String of Sonoma County retail heists part of a trend targeted by new state task force

It only took a couple of minutes, but the group of unarmed thieves who entered the Lululemon store in Santa Rosa's Montgomery Village shopping center last June certainly scored.

Their haul from the shop was an estimated 350 pairs of athletic pants worth about $35,000, police said. The brazen bandits entered the store just past noon, stuffed the loot in bags and said nothing to employees, according to police and prosecutors.

They fled in a black Nissan Altima, eluding officers who had been alerted about the robbery.

Last week, more than eight months after the June 11 heist, three East Bay women were formally charged in Sonoma County Superior Court for the crime.

Elexis Monique Meadores, 29, China Japeirah Omar, 20, both of Oakland, and Jasmine Porsha Hooker, 25, of Pittsburg each face felony grand theft, felony conspiracy to commit a crime and misdemeanor organized retail theft, court documents show. A Sonoma County judge issued arrest warrants for the women on Monday and none of the three had been taken into custody as of Thursday afternoon, said Sonoma County Chief Deputy District Attorney Brian Staebell.

The June robbery was one of at least five reported thefts at the Santa Rosa Lululemon since September 2018, when police said four women stole as much as $19,000 worth of workout clothes before fleeing in a black Mercedes.

The high-profile string of thefts is part of a broader Bay Area and California crime trend - organized heists from retailers - increasingly tied to an online black market, where name-brand clothes especially are proving lucrative for crooks and difficult for investigators to trace.

“The biggest thing with the Lululemon stuff is that none of it is serialized, there's no way to track this,” said Santa Rosa Police Sgt. Dave Marconi, who oversees the agency's property crimes unit. “A lot of those stores have a hands-off policy to keep their employees safe, which I agree with, but at the same time, the people who are committing the crimes also know that and that allows them to be a bit more brazen.”

Another factor, experts say: changes in state law that raised the threshold for felony theft crimes to $950 worth of stolen property.

Quick escapes needed

Locally, the crimes have targeted areas with shopping centers or stores near highways offering quick escape - like the recent grab-and-go robberies at Petaluma clothing retailers, including two thefts in January at the American Eagle Outfitters at the Petaluma Village Premium Outlets that amounted to a total of $13,000 worth of stolen merchandise, authorities said. The outlet mall is located next to Highway 101.

“We mostly see that they're not from Petaluma but other parts of the Bay Area,” Petaluma Police Lt. Tim Lyons said of the thieves who have targeted Petaluma businesses in recent years. “The bigger thing is, how are they getting rid of all this merchandise? What are you going to do with a couple hundred pairs of jeans? That's the thing everyone's working on.”

The pattern, repeated far and wide across the state, has spurred the creation of a California Highway Patrol task force charged with identifying organized retail theft rings and the distributors who drive the black market for the stolen goods, said CHP Lt. Kevin Domby, who oversees the Bay Area-based unit.

Distributors use traditional means of turning the stolen merchandise into a profit, such as reselling it at flea markets or to brick-and-mortar businesses that can place the product in stores. But more are turning to online marketplaces to unload the stolen goods, which has the added benefit of concealing their identities, Domby said.

The agency received $5.8 million in state funding to crack down on the theft rings. In the same measure, the state Legislature also made it a crime to coordinate with others to steal merchandise from a business, a law intended to combat organized retail theft rings.

Favored targets include stores carrying name-brand clothes, makeup and other high-end consumer products, authorities said.

The CHP unit, which has two other teams in San Diego and Los Angeles, plans to work with local law enforcement departments and retailers to piece together information about criminal networks. The CHP's broader jurisdiction is expected to be an asset in tracking retail thieves, who typically travel longer distances over the state's highways to carry out their crimes, Domby said.

“(Retailers) share that information internally, and what we're doing is connecting with the retailers, taking that information that they're sharing and connecting the dots,” Domby said. “They really suffer when they try to take these groups on, especially when groups get violent with store employees.”

While there's no state or national database that tracks organized retail thefts, the crime trend has been widely felt among businesses, with 97% of retailers reporting such thieves targeted their stores in the past year, a study published by the National Retail Federation in December found. Stolen merchandise cost retailers roughly $700,000 per $1 billion in sales last year alone, and designer clothing was the most commonly stolen item, making up a quarter of the items stolen by organized thieves, the study showed.

Lululemon a target

In Santa Rosa, the Lululemon in Montgomery Village “immediately comes to mind” when thinking about businesses that have been targeted by the organized retail theft groups locally, given the number of recent theft reports there, Marconi said.

Santa Rosa officers have also investigated thefts at the Apple store at the Santa Rosa Plaza mall in recent years, Marconi said. He pointed to one local case from about five years ago that involved a crime ring that was breaking down cellphones stolen from the store and then selling the pieces separately, which, like stolen clothing, made it more difficult for authorities to track, Marconi said.

In 2019 alone, officers were notified of 46 thefts at the Petaluma Village Premium Outlets. Officers also were called to investigate thefts at the Dick's Sporting Goods in the East Washington Place shopping center 16 times last year and at the nearby Ulta Beauty on seven occasions during the same period.

Those calls included reports of felony theft, which exceeds $950 in stolen goods, but also lower-level stealing, according to Lyons, the Petaluma lieutenant.

In late January, the agency arrested four people suspected of returning stolen merchandise in exchange for gift cards at Dick's Sporting Goods. Officers, who pulled the suspects over as they were leaving the parking lot, were called to the store by employees, who said the group matched suspects captured on surveillance video during a robbery hours prior at a Dick's Sporting Goods in Fairfield.

The organized thieves tend to ignore more rural areas of the county, which are devoid of the high-end retailers typically targeted by the retail theft groups, said Sgt. Juan Valencia, spokesman for the Sonoma County Sheriff's Office.

The Friedman's Home Improvement on Santa Rosa Avenue occasionally reports thefts of products such as tools, though most don't meet the $950 threshold for felony crimes, he said.

“People want the Lululemon, the high-end clothing,” Valencia said. “You're going to draw a market for that.”

Lululemon did not respond to multiple requests for information and comment.

Protecting employees

The organized thefts are prompting retailers to create a stronger line of defense while at the same time adopting policies to protect their employees, said Rachel Michelin, the president of the California Retailers Association.

Big box retailers are increasingly hiring security guards for their stores to deter thieves from targeting their businesses in the first place and to quickly relay information to police when they do.

A security guard at the Lululemon store in Santa Rosa was hospitalized after one of the 2019 robberies, when he confronted two men as they fled the shop with an estimated $15,500 worth of yoga wear.

Vallejo residents Jarontae Madison and Latrell Lamont King, both now 22, were identified as suspects in the robbery after they were pulled over in a gold Nissan Pathfinder on Highway 101 by Petaluma officers. Clothing missing from the store was found in the car during the stop, police said.

Many companies also have adopted policies that prevent store employees from trying to intervene when the thefts occur, Michelin said.

“Our fear is from the perspective of how this is impacting employees,” Michelin said. “In some cases, retailers are their first job. They're 16 or 17 years old.”

Finding a balance

While effective at keeping employees safe, rules adopted by the industry can at times hinder police investigating theft rings, Lyons said. Some policies prevent employees from calling 911 until suspects have left the store. In cases when police are called, officers rely on vehicle descriptions to try to track down fleeing suspects, though there have been cases where no description is available from employees or witnesses, Lyons added.

“They know some store policies, (the employees) are not going to stop them,” he said of the organized retail thieves. “They get a head start.”

Michelin said she hoped the CHP task force will lead to the creation of practices that will help both retailers and law enforcement. Her group co-sponsored the 2018 legislation that helped spawn the special unit.

Communication with businesses is a priority for the task force in the months to come, along with partnering with local law enforcement agencies whose officers are the first to respond, said Domby, the CHP lieutenant.

So far, a San Francisco District Attorney's Office investigator and two sergeants with the city's police department have agreed to work with the CHP unit.

“We're hoping to expand that,” Domby said. “That gives us the ability to see what those agencies and others need.”

You can reach Staff Writer Nashelly Chavez at 707-521-5203 or nashelly.chavez@pressdemocrat.com.