Armored Truck Guard Killed in Market Robbery : Holdup Man Takes Own Life After Shoot-Out Inside Lakewood Store

As horrified shoppers looked on, an armored car security guard was shot to death in a Lakewood supermarket Friday by a robber who then turned his pistol on himself. The robber died a short time later from a gunshot wound in the head.

In an abrupt face-to-face duel with pistols, the two men confronted each other just inside the Vons store, while a second guard locked in the cab of an armored car outside frantically blared a warning to his partner on the truck’s horn.

The robber jammed his gun into the guard’s stomach and pulled the trigger. The guard, John Allen Stoddart, 25, of Santa Ana--a bag of cash still in one hand and his .38-caliber pistol in the other--fired two shots before he toppled over, mortally wounded, according to a Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department spokesman.

“If you could see the terror in this guy’s face, watching his partner get blown away,” said Joe Salemi, a witness to the shoot-out, describing the guard still in the armored car. “It was like something out of ‘Miami Vice.’

“He (the guard in the car) just freaked. He had his gun drawn. His face was pressed against the glass . . . windshield” as the shooting unfolded.

Then, as deputies from the nearby Lakewood station quickly surrounded the market, the gunman, apparently seeing there was no escape, shot himself in the head. The robber, a man about 30 years old, has not been identified, deputies said.

Scene Unfolded

The scene unfolded at mid-morning, as about 40 shoppers and Vons employees looked on in horror, then dropped to the floor as the shots exploded.

“The guard was a real hero,” said Salemi, 30, of Long Beach, who had gone to the store to use a bank machine. “The guy really traded his life for everybody else’s who was there. If he didn’t fire those couple of rounds, I think the suspect would have killed us all. He really saved everybody around.”

After the first exchange of gunfire, Salemi--standing only three feet away from the dueling men--stood up and saw the guard prone in a pool of blood and the robber slumped over.

When Salemi went to try to help the gunman, the man leveled his weapon at him.

“He could have killed me,” Salemi said. “I dove to one side; I hit the ground. I yelled to everybody in the store ‘Get back. Go back. He’s reloading his gun.’ ”

Before deputies could enter the store, the suspect put his pistol to his head and killed himself.

Stoddart was the third employee of Armored Transport of California in Los Angeles to die in a holdup since October.

“It appears the suspect acted alone,” Deputy Sam Jones said of this latest shooting.

Sheriff’s deputies found the robber’s car--with a green jacket and a box of ammunition inside it--parked behind the shopping center in the 4000 block of Hardwick Street. The rust-colored Cadillac had been reported stolen Monday.

As the shooting erupted, people fled the store, said Merlyn Haase, an electrician who was at work in the back of the supermarket.

Liz Bowden, who works at a dry cleaners adjacent to the supermarket, heard screams and the shots coming from inside and “thought it was an explosion.”

“I locked up the store right away,” she said. “You’re not safe anywhere anymore.”

Two saleswomen from a nearby dress shop heard shots.

“Pow, pow--slow-like,” said one, Kay Wiser. “Then there was a series of pops, like an automatic.”

First Incident

A Vons employee who asked not to be identified said the supermarket, which opened six years ago, has been robbed twice. Vons spokeswoman Mary McAboy said Friday’s incident was the first armored car robbery at any Vons.

She said the company will immediately establish a counseling service to help employees recover from the trauma of the shooting.

Larue Quiznell, 61, the owner of the stolen Cadillac, said in a telephone interview that her car had been taken from the parking lot of another Vons market near her home in Redondo Beach by a light-haired male with a “Joe College” look to him.

She was getting into her car after grocery shopping on Monday when the man, whom she described as about 25 years old and 6 feet tall, walked up to her and asked her the time.

As she was putting bags of groceries into the back seat, the man pulled out a pistol, pointed it at her and said, “I really need your car bad.”

“Then he told me, ‘I could blow your head off,’ and my keys went right to him,” Quiznell said.

She knew her stolen car was found before investigators had the chance to tell her: “My sister saw it on TV.,” Quiznell said.

At his Placentia home, James Stoddart, the dead guard’s father, said that he and his wife worried when their son took the security guard job but that he enjoyed the work.

“We were a little concerned for him,” Stoddart said. “I expected the worst. I’m that kind of person. So I wasn’t surprised (upon hearing of his death).

“His mom even suggested we buy him a bulletproof vest,” Stoddart added. “I knew he wouldn’t have worn it. We should have done it anyway.”

Stoddart lived for the last year with a friend of his since seventh grade, Julie Robertson, 26, and her boyfriend, Greg Lease, in a Santa Ana apartment. Robertson and Lease, who both work for Southern California Bank, were planning to join Stoddart on a trip to Disneyland today and then to Las Vegas in the next few weeks.

The 5-foot-10, 180-pound Stoddart played on a softball team, was an avid bowler and enjoyed football, Robertson said.

“He used to be shy. Lately, he was a lot more outgoing,” he said.

He had thought about becoming a police officer, she said, but believed that he would be disqualified by a lingering complication from an ankle injury.

Was Worried

Like his parents, he too was increasingly worried about occupational hazards, she said. He had worked through high school with her brother at an Arco service station in Anaheim Hills, often on the graveyard shift, without ever being robbed. But she said he had heard of an armored car holdup on the radio, and it was beginning to trouble him.

“He said if they tried to get him, he would try to get them back,” Robertson said.

At Armored Transport, requirements and training are among the highest in the industry, its guards have said. Job applicants undergo psychological tests and get on-the-job training, although state requirements for armed couriers, as the armored guards are called, consists of a two-hour, open-book test and a 14-hour firearms course.

Typically, guards work in pairs, one staying in the armored car at all times, while the other gets out at each of the stops, which number anywhere from 70 to 100 a day. Guards are instructed that no matter what happens outside the armored car, the guard inside is never to get out.

Times staff writers James M. Gomez, Lee Harris, Roxana Kopetman, James Rainey and Chris Woodyard contributed to this story.