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.”
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