Victims Recall Tense Moments Facing Ski-Mask Gunman

It was five minutes to closing time, and 18-year-old Lisa Knight was sweeping the floor behind a La Habra McDonald’s front counter when the holdup began.

Rising before her face in a blur of a few seconds, Knight said, a ski-masked gunman vaulted the counter and grabbed her.

“I thought it was a joke until I saw the gun,” Knight said Friday of the Feb. 1 robbery for which police hold Harvard sophomore Jose Luis Razo Jr. Razo is a self-proclaimed La Habra “homeboy” who was arrested Monday by La Habra police on suspicion of eight robberies dating back to December, 1985. He is being held in the Orange County Jail.

“Then I was hysterical and crying,” Knight recalled.

Evil-looking with the mask, she said, the bandit dragged her into the kitchen area and “he told me he wouldn’t hurt me if I kept quiet.”

She said the gunman ordered her and several employees to lie on the floor as he strode around waving a semiautomatic pistol.

The tense moments extended as the bandit was given about $700 from the Imperial Highway restaurant’s safe. Panicking at one point when a door slammed, he threatened to shoot everyone in the place, Knight said, then fled through a back door into the night.

“To realize I could have been killed--it was too much.”

Razo had been a local hero admired for his academic achievements and football prowess at Servite High School in Anaheim and now at Harvard. Police said all the robberies he is charged with were committed at times when the 20-year-old Razo was home on school breaks.

On Friday morning, Razo described some of those eight robberies plus other robberies. And there was a similarity between the story offered by the once-promising linebacker and those provided to The Times by victims of the ski-mask bandit.

Carmen Rodriguez, manager of a Whittier Boulevard Burger King, said she heard the bandit shouting before she saw him in a holdup in La Habra on April 5.

It was just shy of 9 the morning, Rodriguez said, and business was slow because clocks had been set forward an hour that day.

“I never work Sundays,” she said with a sigh. “I was working that day for one of my assistant managers. There was only three of us on that morning. And no customers that first half hour.”

As she stood at the front counter at about 8:55 a.m., Rodriguez, 21, said she heard a commotion near the side of the eatery, where an bandit apparently had slipped in unnoticed.

The bandit pointed a blue-steel pistol at employee Stephanie Davidson, La Habra High School student, and hollered “This is a stickup!” Rodriquez said.

She heard the robber “hollering,” realized she could not escape and did not want to abandon her employees. She said she somehow remained calm.

“I waited for him. I knew he needed me,” Rodgriguez said. “I’m the manager, and no one else can open the safe.”

Moments later, the bandit emerged from a kitchen area where--like the robbery at McDonald’s and others--he herded employees at gunpoint. Rodriguez said he asked her if she was the manager, appeared nervous at her composure in replying, then ordered her to unlock the safe and empty it of cash.

“He told me, ‘Throw the quarters in, too,’ ” Rodriguez recalled.

In recalling the robbery, she was mostly cheery Friday afternoon, as she filled diet soda orders for customers, then grew quieter at one point.

She recalled that when a coworker, who speaks only Spanish, misunderstood orders not to look at the bandit, the gunman shouted, “Turn around or I’ll shoot!”

At that moment, she said, the situation seemed to have burst out of control and “that’s when it got to me what was going on.”

In a matter of 15 minutes, the gunman had come and gone, exiting on foot out a back door Rodriguez had unlocked for him, she said. No vehicle was seen or heard.

“Sometimes I wonder if it was real. . . . For me, I feel like you always have to be aware of situations like that that can pop up. But it got to me after a while.”

The funniest thing happened Tuesday, she added, when news broke of Razo’s arrest on Monday. The burger restaurant is perhaps a mile from Razo’s home near La Habra High School, and it is something of a student hangout.

“All of my students (working) here know him. They said ‘Yeah . . . he’s a great guy.’ One employee even said, ‘If I’d been here he wouldn’t have robbed us, because he knows me.’ ”

In a neighborhood just a few blocks from the Burger King, Jose Luis Razo’s family declined Friday to talk about the suspect, on the advice of his attorney Michael McDonell, according to his brother Albert, 17.

Flowers were left at the front door of the Razos’ modest stucco house while they were away early Friday.

Friday morning, a nun from Our Lady of Guadalupe Elementary School, which Razo attended, left a single red rose and note of sympathy at the front door.

About 1 p.m., a floral arrangement was left by Richard Ruiz, a florist, on behalf of a Whittier man.