Good Guy with a Gun #109: Riverside, CA (Free post)
Original incident: February 17, 2024. These smash-and-grab burglars are lucky the owner of Geneva Jewelry shot at the floor instead of directly at them — especially after what he had been through.
These posts are based on our Good Guy with a Gun calendar. If you bought or received a calendar, contact me for a complementary subscription. Today’s post is somewhat updated from the calendar version.
Today is Mardi Gras. Does that mean we should be talking about necklaces and stuff?
So: Two thugs in hoods and masks, carrying satchels, were casing businesses at Canyon Crest Town Center in Riverside. A woman named Maia, who worked in one of the stores there, said that “they opened the door, stuck their head in, looked around, and ran.”
When a customer entered Geneva Jewelry, the lock failed to completely latch behind her. They saw their chance.
They strolled through the door, pulled hammers from their satchels, and started smashing the jewelry cases. They made sure the cases were wide open before they started pulling jewelry out of them.
The customer, whom you can see (with her face blurred out) in the upper-middle of the first picture, tried to get back out the front door; failing that, she walked around the hammer-swinging men and slipped behind the counter and out the back door.
What they weren’t counting on, though, is this guy. I think it’s him, anyway — I believe (without real evidence) that he’s the owner of the store. You can seem him back away as the thugs come in the front door.
As bad as it is to imagine people coming into your store with hammers to steal your stuff, it’s much worse to imagine the trauma of being tied to a chair while thieves rob your store.
But that’s something the owner1 of Geneva Jewelry had experienced some years ago, and he wasn’t likely to forget it. Nor was he going to sit passively by this time.
He showed amazing restraint, shooting at the floor rather than the thugs. They fled, literally falling over themselves as they rushed out the door. It would have been comical if they weren’t pathological and wicked.
They definitely took less than they otherwise might have gotten.
I don’t have a source that shows the surveillance footage in a complete and unbroken sequence, but this report from KTLA 5 — from which the stills above were taken — does a good job of showing what it was like.
The store suffered the shattered cases and a broken window. They planned to re-open within a few days. The robbers, as far as I can tell, were never identified or found. The frustration about the lack of consequences for robbers like this is palpable in any commentary you can find about it, whether on Facebook or in the other forums where it’s discussed.
Regardless, in this case, a firearm made the difference between being a helpless victim and giving the aggressors the bigger scare.
Sources
Primary source
The Riverside PD put up a release to the public on their Facebook page.
News sources
KTLA 5 did a good job with this report, and as you can see, my screen captures come from their video. The video embedded above is the same as what’s on this page that covers the incident. There’s also a brief, earlier write-up with very little detail.
Eyewitness 7 did a decent job as well, giving airtime and a good write-up.
The Press-Enterprise did a write-up.
Johnny at The Adventures of Lone Wolf appears to be a videographer-journalist who posts some of his material on YouTube. He gave what amounts to B-roll of the incident, showing police on scene and local stores. He has disabled embedding, so you’ll need to click through above if you’re interested.
CBS News was kinda lame, giving almost no information about it.
2A and specialist press
Brandon Curtis covered this incident at Concealed Nation.
John Lott’s Crime Prevention Research Center (CPRC) included this in his list of DGUs for February 2024.
Fugitive Watch — a source I haven’t seen before — also covered this incident.
The calendar uses the name Michelangelo Torchia, but that’s the owner’s son.