Grocer ‘Everyone Liked’ Shot to Death in Holdup

Grocer Tomoji (Tommy) Matsuda, a month shy of his 71st birthday, clung fast to his little corner of North Main Street near Chinatown long after the other store owners moved away and graffiti began appearing at every turn.

This is my neighborhood, he’d tell friends who shopped at Toni’s Market on North Main at Ann Street.

The area was battered and forgotten, changed to be sure. But he was proud of the three sons he had raised there and the name he had made for himself.

Matsuda was shot and killed Monday on the same corner where he had worked and lived for 39 years--a victim, some say, of the changes he turned a blind eye to.

Toni Matsuda said her husband had chatted with a group of children who had bought candy before starting to restock the shelves. She was at a cash register in front and her husband was at the rear when a young man and woman entered late in the afternoon. Both were wearing black clothing and sunglasses.

“They had been looking at the spaghetti mix, waiting for the other customers to leave the store,” Toni Matsuda said. “Then the man came over and pointed a gun at me and said, ‘This is a stickup and get on the floor, flat.’ . . . My husband thought that guy was going to kill us.” Tommy Matsuda pulled the gun he kept for protection and ran to the front of the store.

“It all happened so fast. I don’t know who shot first. I saw my husband slump down. I ran to him and he was already bleeding a lot in the head.

“The man told the woman, ‘Go! Go!’ but she just stood there, dumbfounded. He yelled ‘Go!’ another time and then they left.

“They didn’t get anything.”

An unidentified customer was shot in the leg.

Matsuda died shortly after 10 p.m. Monday at County-USC Medical Center.

Toni Matsuda described the gunman as a Latino, about 25, about 5-feet-7, thin and well-groomed with short, dark brown hair. The woman was a Latina, also about 25, standing about 5-feet-6, also thin and with curly, shoulder-length hair.

“I was always badgering them to move and come up to live with us,” said Matsuda’s oldest son, Dennis, 36, of Spokane, Wash. “But there were still a lot of people (in the neighborhood) that he felt close to. He knew a lot of people there and liked it. Everyone knew him. Everyone liked him.

“The area always had its violent side. But I don’t remember it being really this violent. I remember my dad commenting that it was getting more dangerous, that the people seemed to be getting more dangerous. But he didn’t want to leave.”

On Tuesday, the curious gathered in front of the small grocery, named in honor of Matsuda’s wife. A cardboard sign notified customers that the store would be closed through today.

John Gardenas, 18, a resident of a housing project across the street, said Matsuda had worked at the store for as long as he could remember.

“I think Tommy was there when my grandmother lived around here,” Gardenas said. “He was nice. He spoke English, Spanish, Chinese. Everybody liked Tommy.”

Matsuda’s wife said her husband was born in Japan and that his family immigrated to the United States from Peru in the 1940s. He spent a year during World War II in a detention center for Japanese-Americans, then moved to Denver, where he met Toni.

They married in December, 1948, and moved to Los Angeles in 1950, choosing a lively area of “mom and pop” stores along North Main Street near downtown as an ideal spot to open a dry-cleaning business. The family lived for a while over a dry cleaner’s on North Main, directly across from Ann Street Elementary, which the children would later attend.

“We didn’t know anything about dry-cleaning,” Toni Matsuda recalled. “We learned it from the ground up. We brought up a son, then the twins came along, and later a friend of ours put us in the grocery business.”

In 1966, the Matsudas opened Toni’s Market, catering to the nearby housing projects and the shrinking number of other residences in the area.

By the 1970s, the neighborhood was changing. Other businesses closed or moved out, gangs moved in and the area took on a rougher look.

The family eventually moved to another part of Los Angeles. But Matsuda refused to consider moving his business.

“He was a very hard worker and he liked everybody,” said Kenneth Yow Jr., who owned the grocery building. “He had been there so long that nobody gave him any problems. He knew everybody, and everybody knew him.”

But as the years passed, Yow said, Matsuda privately expressed concern over rising crime.

“He knew it wasn’t safe,” Yow said. “But when you have to make a living, you have to put up with it.”

Yow said Matsuda, like other area merchants, “always kept a gun, because you don’t know what is going to happen.”

Funeral arrangements for Matsuda were incomplete Tuesday.

Toni Matsuda said she was not sure if she would return to the grocery to work. She said longtime customers had been calling to express their condolences.

“I have no bitterness toward the neighborhood,” she said. “I don’t hold it against anybody because two crazy people do something like this.

“It was never a place to be scared. You can’t blame a neighborhood when something like this happens.”