Couple Targeted in Home-Invasion Robbery

A group of gun-toting thieves burst into a home Wednesday night, took a jeweler and his wife hostage and forced the couple to drive to their Tarzana jewelry store, which the thieves then robbed, police said.

The robbers took cash and property worth more than $100,000, then dumped the couple, bound and gagged, in an alley in Sherman Oaks.

“This was not your ordinary home-invasion robbery,” Los Angeles Police Det. Robert Joe Hansen said. “This was planned. [The robbers] told the victim that they had been following him for three to four weeks.”

The incident began early Wednesday evening when a woman came to the couple’s home on Gleneagles Drive near Vanalden Avenue, said she was having a problem and asked to use the telephone, Hansen said.

The jeweler’s wife handed a portable phone to the woman, then closed the front door behind her.

But seconds later, the door flew open with enough force to knock the startled woman inside to the ground, according to Hansen.

An unidentified man and the woman who had appealed for help burst into the home, punched and kicked the victim, and dragged her into another room where they bound her wrists, placed duct tape over her mouth and forced her to lie on the floor, police said.

Two other men, brandishing guns and wearing ski masks, overpowered her husband, who had pulled up to the garage of the white single-story home. The intruders taped the husband’s mouth shut and bound his hands, then hustled the pair into separate cars, including the couple’s Ford Explorer.

After stopping briefly at a local park to consult with other suspects, two of the robbers took the jeweler to his Ventura Boulevard store, Nazareth’s Jewelers, where he was forced to disable the alarm and unlock the marble-lined display cases and the safe, police said.

At the same time, the other pair drove the woman back home, where she lay on the floor while they ransacked the house, helping themselves to jewelry, money and at least two guns.

In the end, the intruders loaded both victims into the cars, dumped them in an alley in the 15700 block of Hartsook Street, then fled with the couple’s Ford Explorer.

From start to finish, the ordeal took two hours, police said.

“I feel terrible that it happened to them,” neighbor Bonnie Lagerstrom said. “They had gotten married recently and were busy remodeling their house.”

“This is a really safe area,” said another woman who has lived in the neighborhood for 20 years. The thieves “must have known the man had a jewelry store.”

No arrests were made. At the home, a spokeswoman for the couple declined to comment.