Scout’s Good Deed Puts an Armed Robbery Suspect Behind Bars

Boy Scout Joey McNabb of Costa Mesa foiled an armed robbery on the Fourth of July.

His father, Joseph McNabb, 41, is scoutmaster of Troop 339, which earns part of its annual budget by running a fireworks stand in Costa Mesa. McNabb, along with an assistant scoutmaster and two other scouts, was closing up the stand shortly after midnight Thursday, when they were approached by an armed man wearing a bandana mask.

The bandit forced the scouts and scoutmasters into the rear of the fireworks stand and made them lie on the floor, while an accomplice went to a motor home parked nearby, where Joey, 12, was preparing to bed down for the night.

“He shoved me into the bathtub,” Joey said. “He pointed a gun at me and said, ‘Stay there and you won’t get hurt.’ ”

But Joey did not stay.

As soon as the masked man was gone, he crept outside, saw his father and friends on the floor of the stand and ran for help.

Running barefoot across a glass-strewn vacant lot, Joey reached the door of Costa Mesa Medical Center Hospital, where a nurse dialed 911 for him to summon police.

Less than a minute later, he said, a patrol car and a helicopter arrived at the stand. One suspect, later identified as Joseph Daniel Lopez, 19, was captured after a brief exchange of gunfire with officers in which no one was hurt.

Lopez was booked on suspicion of armed robbery and held in lieu of $50,000 bail. The other suspect was still being sought.

Joey was proud and happy. And so was his father, who said the incident had given him a whole new slant on scouting.

“We go camping and backpacking a lot,” he explained, and until now “the thing we worried about most was snakes.”