How 4 Robbers Upended a Jeweler’s Life

Robert G. Gossett celebrated his 70th birthday this week, an occasion he had expected to mark by putting in a full day at the family’s jewelry shop and then returning home to the toasts and company of his wife, three children and a pair of grandchildren.

But these are not normal times in the life of Bob Gossett. Since Oct. 4, when four masked hoodlums stormed his store and gunned him down, the jeweler has battled first for his life and now for his chance to walk again.

After more than half a century behind a jeweler’s desk or hunched over a magnifying glass, Gossett now lies in a Saddleback Hospital bed, paralyzed from the chest down.

It was a quiet Tuesday morning last month when Gossett last came to his El Toro store, Gossett Jewelers. A few customers had stopped by early to pick up batteries and other small items. Three customers, including a woman with a 4-year-old daughter, were browsing, aided by one of Gossett’s sons and his daughter, both of whom work in the store.

But as the customers hovered over the glass display cases at about 10:45, four assailants burst through the front door and fanned out with military precision. They wore stockings over their faces and brightly colored sweat suits. One may have been a woman, but even that detail is not clear, witnesses said.

As they swiftly moved through the store--”like Ninjas or something,” a witness recalls--one assailant brandished a weapon.

“Hold it. Don’t move,” he barked as his cohorts began smashing display cases and shoveling jewelry into a pillow case.

The customers did as told, but Gossett emerged from the back room with a gun of his own. He did not fire his weapon, but just the sight of it touched off chaos. The robbers fired at least seven shots, and Gossett went down, unconscious in a pool of blood running from his shoulder.

Four weeks later, he is still down. Doctors say he will likely survive the wound, but chances are he will never walk again.

“My father went down right in front of me,” Richard Gossett haltingly recalled during one of a series of recent interviews. “They hit him with the first bullet. It happened so quickly. It was so bizarre, so unbelievable.”

With nothing to duck behind and his father at his feet, Richard Gossett jerked violently from side to side as bullets careened through the shop. Luckily, neither he nor anyone else was hit.

Robert Gossett was rushed to the emergency room at Mission Hospital, where he underwent five hours of surgery to remove the bullet. Fragmenting as it hit him, one chunk careened through his lung, collapsing it. The second lodged near his spinal cord, not severing it but causing enough shock on the spine to induce paralysis.

For a while, it looked as though recovery was proceeding smoothly. Gossett was transferred to Saddleback Hospital last week, where he was scheduled to begin the arduous process of physical therapy.

But he was plagued by severe headaches, and doctors interpreted the pain as a sign of deeper troubles.

So Gossett returned to surgery Monday for another six hours. This time, the operation was to secure his spinal column; he had been losing spinal fluid, doctors said, a dangerous situation that the surgery apparently resolved, though Gossett remains in severe pain.

Last month’s robbery was not the first time Gossett Jewelers has been struck, but it was the most traumatic. Just three months ago the store was burglarized, and an earlier burglary, nine years ago “wiped us out,” Richard Gossett said.

“It took us five years to recover from that,” he added ruefully. “It’ll take a lot longer to recover this time.”

In October’s heist, the robbers got away with almost nothing except Robert Gossett’s health. After the gunfire, they dropped their pillow case and fled in a white car waiting for them in a corner parking lot.

Descriptions of the assailants are still sketchy, but Sheriff’s Lt. Richard J. Olson said deputies are cooperating with other law enforcement agencies as they pursue the case. “We’re working with all the surrounding jurisdictions to see if we can link these guys to crimes in other areas,” Olson said.

While the Sheriff’s Department chases leads, members of the Gossett family are trying to put their lives back together. The robbery is still an unspoken topic between Robert Gossett and his son, who is caretaker of the family business while his father struggles to recover.

“I’m not at all anxious to step into my father’s footsteps,” Richard Gossett said Wednesday as he prepared for yet another trip to the hospital. “No one can do that.”