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Employees punched, kicked and weaponized a chair to fight off thieves armed with hammers during an attempted smash-and-grab heist on Sunday at a jewelry store in the Bella Terra shopping center in Huntington Beach.
The thieves bolted into Princess Bride Diamonds at 7821 Edinger Ave around noon, police said. Four people dressed in dark clothing immediately used a hammer to smash a display case, as seen in surveillance footage the store shared in an Instagram story.
The intruders had pulled into the outdoor mall’s parking lot in a Honda, said an employee at a nearby store who declined to give his name for safety reasons. He said he saw three or four people wearing ski masks and carrying hammers get out of the car. One of them was carrying a backpack with a camouflage print.
“As soon as I saw them get out of the car, I knew they were going to rob Princess Bride,” he said.
They came and went, he said, in under a minute.
As the masked thieves ransacked the store, two employees rushed at them and exchanged blows, knocking one intruder to the ground, the video shows. Another staff member carrying a chair ran toward the melee and struck one of the thieves with it as they attempted to flee.
“We fought back and are ok,” someone from the store wrote in the intro to the Instagram video.”Fortunately they were not able to get anything thanks to our awesome team.”
Justin Lowrie said he was in a garden near the jewelry store when he and several others heard the sound of glass being smashed.
“Some of us ran, thinking the glass breaking was gunshots,” he said.
Brian Lam was working at SomiSomi, an ice cream shop next to the jewelry store, when he heard three loud noises, and then saw one person wearing something covering his face running south toward the parking lot. Lam later peeked inside Princess Bride and saw at least two display glass display cases had been shattered.
Nobody was hurt, according to a woman who answered the phone at the jewelry store on Sunday afternoon.
A description of what, if anything, was taken was not immediately available.
Another smash-and-grab occurred about an hour later in Santa Ana, at Don Roberto’s Jewelry Store on the 1600 block of West 17th Street, Santa Ana Police Sgt. Maria Lopez said. Four thieves managed to take $7,000 worth of merchandise from the business.
Later, police spotted a vehicle suspected to have been involved in the Santa Ana theft, Lopez said. Three people inside were taken into custody in connection with the heist, and investigators were searching for a fourth.
No merchandise was immediately recovered from the suspects or the vehicle they were in, Lopez said. It was not clear if the incidents in Huntington Beach and Santa Ana were related.
Last month, at least two other Orange County jewelry stores were hit with smash-and-grabs. Thieves used hammers to break open glass display cases at Kay Jewelers in the Westminster Mall on April 4, and another branch of that store at the Brea Mall on April 15. About $200,000 worth of merchandise was taken in each of those heists.
As of mid-April, there were at least 35 smash-and-grab jewelry store robberies in California since May of 2021 — a number disproportionate to other states, said John Kennedy, president of the Jewelers’ Security Alliance, an industry nonprofit organization.
It’s not that California is a larger state, he said. He attributed the robberies to gangs.
“That’s way off the charts of being unusual,” he said. “It scares people in the industry.”
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