Restaurant Siege Marked by Series of Small Heroics : Crime: Two McDonald’s assistant managers kept police informed, colleagues calmed throughout ordeal.

The man with the tattooed arms stepped to the counter of the only McDonald’s in La Verne and ordered a Big Mac.

“Just like a regular customer,” assistant manager Ramiro Gironas, 21, would recall. “He stood in line and waited to be helped, just like everyone else.”

But the man was not just like everyone else. According to law enforcement officials, Douglas E. Girard, a 32-year-old ex-convict, and an accomplice, Frank M. Teresi, 38, had just stolen $200 from the Kids Mart store across the street. Unable to make a getaway, they walked across Fruit Street to the McDonald’s, where they apparently hoped to blend in with the other customers.

There was little chance of that: As Gironas took Girard’s money--exact change, he said--several cashiers spotted a .38-caliber revolver tucked in the customer’s pants. Someone else noticed wads of bills in his socks. Employees and customers alike sensed something was wrong.

“He’s got a gun!” one of the McDonald’s workers hissed to her colleagues. Customers dived under tables or ran out of the restaurant. The staff scurried toward a basement lounge. Teresi left the restaurant and surrendered; Girard did not.

The standoff had begun. For the next 6 1/2 hours, 20 people--12 workers and eight customers, including four children and an elderly woman--would remain trapped inside the restaurant as Girard paced nervously and dozens of sheriff’s marksmen stood their ground.

Finally, a few minutes after midnight Tuesday, the heavily armed deputies who had surrounded the building executed a carefully orchestrated attack. Girard was seized, the customers and employees were freed and a drama that teetered on disaster ended with no serious casualties and little bloodshed.

What happened behind the franchise’s plate-glass window, adorned with the ubiquitous golden arches, was a story of small heroics:

An assistant manager who only recently learned English had enough presence of mind to open a telephone line and report the gunman’s every move to deputies; another McDonald’s employee told jokes to relieve the fears of colleagues cowering in the basement; a father trapped in the restaurant coaxed his small children to sleep under a bench to keep them from harm’s way, and, finally, a bristly-haired SWAT team member leaped a counter, sneaked up behind the suspect and wrestled him to the ground, ending the siege without firing a shot.

In the first confusing minutes of the ordeal, Gironas, the assistant manager who three years ago immigrated to California from Cochabamba, Bolivia, and who aspires to one day own a McDonald’s, took care of his crew. He swiftly herded 10 employees to the back of the kitchen portion of the restaurant, through a back door and down a staircase into a basement storeroom.

La Verne police patrol cars, responding to a call on the robbery at the Kids Mart, began arriving.

Girard, his partner already in custody, paced the restaurant, his pistol still in his waistband; he smoked a cigarette, crawled toward a window and peered outside. He chatted with the customers, some of whom stayed on the floor. Yet, at one point, children were seen playing board games, while two others slept under a bench.

Girard never waved the gun nor made threats, La Verne Police Lt. Ron Ingels said.

“We knew he had a gun and all these people were on the floor and he was an armed robber,” Ingels said. “We considered that a hostage situation.”

As the crisis unfolded, La Verne police called in the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. Over the next couple of hours, county helicopters shuttled special weapons and tactics teams to the town on the county’s eastern edge. A command post had been set up at Lutheran High School, about two blocks from the McDonald’s, where crowds of reporters, rescue teams and nervous relatives converged.

La Verne city officials offered a floor plan of the restaurant. Franchise owner Mark Brownstein helped diagram the details.

The SWAT team members, dressed in olive-colored combat fatigues and armed with 9-millimeter submachine guns, pored over the plans. Holed up behind closed doors in the command post, they listed the steps of their strategy on a chalkboard and even drew out the path they would take.

“It was like dance steps,” sheriff’s Capt. Dan Burt said. “In their minds, they had been in that restaurant before.”

Some deputies watched the McDonald’s from a distance with binoculars. Eventually others, as they moved in and surrounded the building, would watch Girard through the scopes on their high-powered sniper rifles.

Inside the McDonald’s, Gironas and another assistant manager, Anis Hussain, 25, were able to move about in the back of the food preparation area and up and down the back stairs. Hussain would descend occasionally to reassure his colleagues in the basement, who had used large metal canisters of soft drink to barricade themselves.

“I was just trying to comfort them and to convince them that everything was going to be fine,” Hussain said. He even told jokes, filling the basement with muted laughter.

Gironas would stay upstairs, and he and Hussain would communicate through headsets from the McDonald’s drive-through section. And, in a instinctive reaction that authorities later praised as critical to the standoff’s safe end, Gironas opened a telephone line to deputies at the command post. Using a phone at the back of the food preparation area, he described to the plotting deputies every move the suspect made.

The noise from a 1,000-pound ice maker that covers part of the back wall apparently masked his voice.

Throughout the evening, Girard never bothered Hussain and Gironas or spoke to them, even though on occasion their eyes made contact. No one knew why.

“Clearly, he could see us,” Hussain said.

Shortly after 8 p.m., Hussain went upstairs and motioned to one of the customers on the floor, a minister. Taking the cue, the man escaped by crawling away under the counter and into the basement, led by Hussain.

Girard apparently saw the minister, Hussain said, but again he did nothing.

Girard’s behavior would also perplex customer Gary Lutz, who found the suspect to be “very friendly.” But Lutz’s first concern was his two children.

Crouched on the floor by a door, Lutz, a truck driver from Pomona, tried to coax 3-year-old Rebecca and 6-year-old David to sleep.

“I just told them to stay down, try to go to sleep, (that) we were going to be here for a while,” said Lutz, 39, who found his evening meal abruptly halted when police surrounded the McDonald’s.

He was worried that if his children got restless they would want to move around, play, or go to the bathroom. Any such movement, he feared, might put them in the path of someone’s bullet.

Fortunately, Lutz said, the two youngsters just “conked out” on the floor under a bench.

The only time they cried would come later when the SWAT team burst in. For a short time after the siege ended, deputies handcuffed Lutz until he could prove his identity.

Rather than being afraid of Girard, Lutz said his greatest fear was getting caught in a potential cross-fire between deputies and their target. Lutz would occasionally poke his head up to see if police cars were still about.

“You don’t know what to do really,” Lutz said later as he rested at home. “Should you get up and leave? The whole place is surrounded. . . . I got my kids there, wondering what the hell was going on. There’s guns all around the building. I don’t know what’s going on.”

As Girard moved around speaking with different customers, Lutz never noticed a gun--though he did see Girard hiding a knife--and never heard the man issue a threat or orders.

“He’s talking to me like he was late for work and had to pick up his wife,” Lutz said of the suspect. “He said he had to go to work at 12, and . . . I said, ‘Well, you’re late.’ He said the cops shouldn’t be doing this.”

Throughout the ordeal, relatives and friends of hostages converged on the parking lots near Fruit Street and Foothill Boulevard. They huddled around radios and police scanners to glean whatever information they could.

Vivian Ramsey, the aunt of trapped McDonald’s employee Sabrina Hawkins, 21, crouched behind a berm about 150 yards away from the restaurant and tried to control her fear. Rumors swirled around her.

She thought she heard a police radio say that a body had been found in the bathroom. No, that’s wrong, someone told her, leaving her confused and anxious.

“It just felt like my heart fell out of me,” she said. “You see this all the time on TV but you never expect something like this could come so close to you.”

For three hours she waited in the parking lot with other relatives for tiny bits of news that would dribble out on television or radio.

“That was the hardest thing,” she said. “Just not knowing anything.”

Now it was nearly 11:30 p.m. Time, the SWAT officers decided, to move.

Officers told Hussain and Gironas by telephone that the group in the basement should escape through an emergency door above their hideout.

The group--10 employees, Hussain and the minister--walked up the stairs into the protection of SWAT team members, automatic weapons at the ready. Then, their arms interlocked and surrounded by deputies, they walked up darkened Fruit Street to the command post.

Once they were out, eight members of the SWAT team--each assigned to control a section of the restaurant floor--crept up the basement steps and into the kitchen. In the lead was Deputy Jim Harrell, whose assignment was to reach the gunman.

Harrell, a former Navy man with a bristly flattop haircut, felt his heart pumping as he crawled across the floor toward a steel counter. On the other side stood his target.

“This is what we train for,” said Harrell, an 11-year veteran. “Scared isn’t the right word for it. You’re just really hyped up; your senses are really keen.”

As he and the others reached the counter, they reported back to the command post that they were 20 to 25 feet from the suspect and could grab him in two seconds. Their mode of communication: a high-tech miniature radio system run by sensors up against the wearer’s voice box, which allowed the men to whisper and not give themselves away.

Outside, in front of the restaurant, three two-member teams trained their sniper scopes on Girard. Using the same communication system, they relayed information on the suspect’s location and movements.

The final go-ahead came. Members of the SWAT team set off three “flash-bang” explosives, devices used to divert a suspect’s attention. At that, Harrell and his partners vaulted over the counter.

Girard probably never knew what hit him. With the flashes reverberating in the misty night air, Harrell tackled the suspect, shoved a knee in the middle of his back and pressed his nose, by then bleeding, into the floor.

No shots were fired. No hostages were injured. In fact, Girard at that point was apparently no longer armed. Deputies found a .38-caliber revolver that they believe was Girard’s stashed in the bathroom.

“It was a classic old hostage rescue attempt done kind of universally . . . around the world,” said Sgt. Gary Rovarino, who commanded the operation. “By the time he knew we were in his immediate zone of threat, it was too late.”

Girard and Teresi are scheduled to be arraigned this week on charges of armed robbery and false imprisonment.

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