Tustin Heist Is Third Major Jewelry Store Robbery in a Month

Three gunmen held up a Tustin jewelry store Thursday, binding and gagging two employees, then fleeing with about $500,000 in necklaces, rings and watches, police said.

“All the stock is stolen, all the jewelry,” Tustin Police Lt. Frank Semelsberger said. The employees were “shaken up but otherwise unhurt,” he said.

It was the third major Orange County jewelry store robbery since Nov. 22, when four heavily armed men entered Slavick’s Jewelers at South Coast Plaza in Costa Mesa just before closing time, ordered employees and customers to lie on the floor and emptied display cases of about $1 million in jewelry. On Dec. 4, a gunman took more than $500,000 in jewelry from Neiman Marcus at Fashion Island in Newport Beach.

Semelsberger said Tustin police will confer with the other police departments to “see if we’ve got anything in common.”

The most recent robbery was detected Thursday when a postal carrier on his rounds thought it was unusual that the front door of Michelangelo Jewelers in the 17300 block of 17th Street was locked at 12:20 p.m. The shop normally opens at 11 a.m., Semelsberger said.

The mailman walked to the rear of the building and heard pounding from inside the back rooms of the business, he said. Police were summoned and officers forced open the front door of the shop.

Two male employees were found bound and gagged on the floor of a storage area, Semelsberger said.

They told police that 10 or 15 minutes before the store was to open, a man about 40 years of age tapped on the front window. When one of the employees opened the door to let him in, two men entered with him and produced handguns, Semelsberger said.

The store’s safe was open because the employees had been preparing to stock the display shelves, Semelsberger said. The timing of the robbery may indicate the gunmen were familiar with the store’s routine “or they’ve done this before,” he said.

“I think it was planned,” Semelsberger said. “The guys shook up the victims.”

A worker at Jean Dahl, a woman’s clothing store next to the jewelry store, said she heard banging on a wall at the rear of the store for more than an hour after she arrived for work.

“I thought it was carpentry,” she said. As it turned out, it was the jewelry store employees kicking the wall to attract attention.

Earlier this week, a 20-year-old man was arrested in Culver City in connection with last month’s robbery at Slavick’s Jewelers in South Coast Plaza. Jereal (also known as Delvin) Deon Griffin of Hawthorne was arrested Monday by Culver City police on a warrant for driving with a suspended license. Police determined that there was another warrant for his arrest in connection with the Costa Mesa jewelry store robbery.

Costa Mesa police said they identified Griffin through a fingerprint.

Times staff writer George Bundy Smith contributed to this article.