Robber Steals a Bit of Laguna’s Security

It was one of those news events, such as a crosswalk fatality or a bank robbery, that rate a couple of paragraphs on a newspaper’s digest page. But an armed robbery of a Laguna Beach jewelry store also gave a sense of the changing face of a town.

I was running an errand on Forest Avenue, Laguna’s quaint main street, when I noticed an unusual scene. Three police officers and a couple of firemen stood outside John’s Gem & Jewelry Co. Near them, crouched on the sidewalk, was store owner John Chung. His face was pale and his wrists were bleeding. And as he huddled near the curb, he was struggling to breathe. In the doorway of his shop, a large fan whirred, blowing acrid fumes into the street.

Several minutes earlier, Chung, 34, had been robbed by a man with a gun who ordered him into a back room, bound his wrists with tape, then fled into rush-hour traffic with $95,000 worth of jewelry. But before the thief escaped, he had stopped for one vicious parting shot--squirting Chung square in the face with a caustic, Mace-like spray.

Chung, treated later that day at South Coast Medical Center, was not seriously injured. And true to form, the next day’s Times gave an abbreviated account of the crime.

But our 15-line story did not convey the shock that Chung and neighboring merchants felt. At Bushard’s Pharmacy across the street, employees were astounded to learn of the armed robbery. “Here?” a saleswoman had asked. “Not here!” And at the Khyber Pass, an Oriental rug store several doors from Chung’s jewelry store, salesman Noorzai Mirwais said he had only worked in Laguna two weeks, “but now I’m kind of scared.”

Police investigator Lance Ishmael said later: “Most people don’t think that a thing like this can happen in Laguna Beach. But this is not the sleepy little town everyone thought it was.”

Actually Laguna’s crime rate in recent years has stayed pretty much the same. Last year the city counted 29 robberies, only four more than in 1982. Still, Chung’s robbery was the town’s first armed robbery in at least six years, and it marked the first time Ishmael could remember that a robber had wielded a chemical spray.

Ten years ago, as an act of harassment, someone rolled a tear gas canister into a gay bar, Fire Capt. Jim Dempsey said, but he couldn’t remember anything like this.

There have been other signs that Laguna’s 24,000 residents are grappling with change. Three million tourists a year flood the village streets, clogging Coast Highway with bumper-to-bumper traffic and turning Main Beach into a small-scale version of Coney Island.

As the crowds have grown, Laguna’s central shopping district has changed. Out-of-town landlords have jacked up commercial rents to as much as $7,000 a month, forcing local appliance shops, hardware stores and recently a popular bakery to close or move off Forest Avenue. In their place, glitzy galleries and beachwear boutiques now cater to tourists.

Chung was one of Laguna’s newcomers. He had liked the ambiance of the town. “It seemed a unique place for artistic work,” he said. And so last June, he opened his business in an ivy-covered brick-and-stucco building. And because his family owned a workshop in Costa Mesa as well as a factory in Hong Kong, he could sell fine-crafted ruby and emerald rings at competitive prices--for a couple hundred dollars apiece.

But the robbery left Chung a bitter man. He worried that the robber might return. And if Laguna was not the safe town he had thought it was, he wasn’t sure he would stay. If someone were to buy his business, “I would be happy to be out,” Chung said.