On a quiet Monday around noon, two men dressed in black stepped onto an ascending escalator in the underground parking lot of an open-air mall in Century City in Los Angeles. By the time they had reached the top, they'd pulled on ski masks and they were sprinting.
“They're coming, they're coming!” yelled Damian Dupre, a security guard at a Gearys luxury-watch boutique, when he saw the men running toward the store. Dupre is a solid six feet three inches, but as he rushed to lock the front door, the men were already pushing their way in. The first intruder, a short, stocky man carrying a rifle, burst in and his gun went off, shattering a glass case. “Get on the ground!” he yelled, and the guard and three other Gearys employees dropped to the floor. “Hurry up!” the man shouted to his partner. “We got to go!”
Just four days earlier, a man built like one of the robbers had visited Gearys, posing as a customer. Employees noticed his outlandish outfit—a checked blazer and long denim shorts—and the way he used his phone to film the case that held the priciest watches. Now the store's assistant manager, Daniel Arce, was lying facedown next to that same case as the robbers attacked it with hammers. Arce said a prayer as splinters of glass flew everywhere. I'm going to die, he thought.
Less than two minutes had passed before the robbers fled with 36 watches, worth $1.6 million. They sped away in a stolen gray Toyota that police would soon discover outside the mall. Its doors were flung open. Its engine was still running. And the thieves were long gone.
Reply With QuoteOriginally Posted by sean
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