Restaurant Robbers Rape 2 Customers : Tarzana Holdup by 4 or 5 Men Is Similar to 7 Other Incidents

Two women were raped early Monday by armed robbers who held up customers and employees of a Tarzana restaurant before herding them into a freezer and escaping with the night’s receipts, Los Angeles police said.

Witnesses and police said four or five men were involved in the rape and robbery.

Police said they have linked the robbery to seven similar restaurant and motel robberies that have occurred since mid-November, one in North Hollywood and the rest in Ventura and Santa Barbara counties.

One robbery, strikingly similar to the Tarzana incident, occurred 45 minutes earlier Monday in Ventura, police said. One of the earlier robberies involved a rape and another an attempted rape.

The Tarzana restaurant holdup began when the men, brandishing pistols, entered JoJo’s Restaurant, 19100 Ventura Blvd., shortly after 1:30 a.m., police said. After firing several warning shots, they ordered 10 customers and eight employees to drop to the floor.

The restaurant’s manager, Albert Sesma, 65, and an unidentified cook and busboy were pistol-whipped but not seriously hurt, police and restaurant employees said.

The two rape victims, reportedly waitresses from a nearby restaurant who had stopped to have a drink after work, were treated at Northridge Hospital Medical Center. They apparently were raped in a rest room, police said.

In each case, the robbers were black men of similar description who carried revolvers and used similar tactics, said Ventura Police Lt. Art Farrar. Although the first several robberies were carried out by two men, up to five men have been seen in recent robberies, Farrar said. All but one of the robberies occurred late on a Sunday night or early Monday morning.

Sesma said the restaurant had been locked for the night while the last customers finished their drinks when four men forced their way in.

“I was afraid they were going to start shooting everyone. They asked one of the waiters who the manager was and he pointed to me,” Sesma said in an interview Monday in his home.

Sesma’s face was bruised and he said he had welts on his back from where one of the men kicked him after forcing him to take him to the restaurant’s safe, which was open and empty.

“The money was in the cash registers, but he wanted more,” Sesma said. “He kept hitting me. I said, ‘I don’t want to die. If I knew where there was any more money, I’d give it to you.’ I was on the floor lying down and he would stump me on the back with his heel.”

The victims were then taken into the kitchen and ordered into a walk-in refrigerator. Sesma said the robbers had forced several women customers to strip.

“We stayed in there about 10 minutes. We didn’t hear any sounds so we walked out and called police,” Sesma said.

Farrar, the Ventura police lieutenant, said that less than an hour before the Tarzana robbery, three or four black men forced their way into the Hungry Hunter restaurant in Ventura. The robbers fired several shots, forced several several male employees to disrobe, and locked the men in a freezer along with the office manager.

The manager, Terrence Fox, was struck on the head with a pistol when he resisted. The men then fled with an undetermined amount of cash.

The first of four other Ventura County robberies occurred Nov. 18, when two black men in their mid-20s, both armed with revolvers, held up employees and customers at the Fiesta Restaurant, a small food stand in Ventura. No one was injured but the robbers fired several warning shots to scare off two pursuing employees, Farrar said.

Two black men fitting the same description pulled off similar robberies at the City Center Motel in Ventura Dec. 4 , and Ted’s Sizzling Steaks in Ventura on Dec. 9. In the Dec. 9 attack, one of the robbers halted the attempted sexual assault of a female employee by a fellow robber, Farrar said.

Similar robberies occurred Dec. 16 in Carpinteria and Thousand Oaks and on Dec. 31 in North Hollywood. In the latter case, a waitress was raped after two robbers entered Reuben’s Restaurant on Cahuenga Boulevard.