Shot Hurts Off-Duty Officer in Robbery at His Ice Cream Store

An off-duty Los Angeles police sergeant was wounded in the foot by a ricocheting bullet Wednesday afternoon during a robbery at his Baskin-Robbins ice cream store in Reseda, police said.

Sgt. Eugene Smith, 45, was in satisfactory condition after the 12:30 p.m. shooting at the store he owns at 7628 Reseda Blvd., said Lt. Charles Higbie, head of the officer-involved shootings investigations unit.

Smith was taken by paramedics to Northridge Hospital Medical Center and released after treatment for a single gunshot wound to the left foot, Higbie said.

The robber fled unharmed, Higbie said.

Cmdr. William Booth, a police spokesman, said that Smith has been off duty for the past six weeks because of an injury he received while on duty. Booth and other officials refused to describe the injury.

Smith, a 22-year police veteran, is assigned to the Devonshire Division in the western San Fernando Valley.

Smith and his wife, Carolyn, were alone in the ice cream parlor when a man wearing a blue bandanna over his face entered and demanded money, Higbie said. The man fired two shots from a semi-automatic pistol, one of which struck Smith, then fled on foot with an undisclosed amount of cash, Higbie said.

Higbie said Smith did not fire any shots at the robber. He would not say whether the officer was armed.

Diane Chambers, a real estate agent at the Century 21 office adjacent to the ice cream shop, said other stores in the small shopping center have been plagued by crime recently.

“It’s the pits,” she said. “This is the third robbery we’ve had here in the strip in the last couple of months.”

One man, robbed soon after he opened his video store, “got so scared of the whole thing. He closed up shop and left,” Chambers said.