Restaurant Robbers Attack Patrons, Staff

Three armed robbers terrorized customers and staff at a family restaurant in the Harbor Gateway area, slashing the throat of a cook, sexually assaulting one patron and pistol-whipping others, police said Monday.

Armed with handguns, the men took control Sunday night of the Grinder restaurant on Sepulveda Boulevard, said Det. Lyle Prideaux of the Los Angeles Police Department’s Harbor Division.

The brutality of the robbery struck detectives as extreme.

“These were very vicious suspects,” said Lt. Wallace Graves. “This kind of violence, this type of crime is rare. I’ve seen it before, but you don’t see it often.”

The gunmen burst into the restaurant about 10:30 p.m. and ordered the four customers and three workers onto the floor, police said.

During the 20-minute ordeal, a 21-year-old customer was sexually assaulted, police said. Two couples stumbled in on the robbery. One couple were attacked and needed treatment for bruises at Harbor Bay Hospital. The pair, one of whom was a 63-year-old woman recovering from brain surgery, were later released, police said.

As the restaurant’s cook tried to collect cash for the robbers, one of the men slashed him. The 36-year-old man was rushed to a hospital, where he remained in stable but serious condition. He was expected to survive, Prideaux said.

“There may have been some frustration on the part of the suspects with the way victims were complying to their demands,” Graves said. “It may have been that they weren’t complying as quickly as the suspects would have liked. [But] it appears that the victims were attempting to comply.”

The men looted the restaurant’s cash register and robbed patrons and workers of money and personal items before fleeing with more than $1,300 in cash, police said.

Officers described the three men--two black and one white--as in their late 20s, about 5 feet, 10 inches or 6 feet tall, with slender builds. At least one of the men was wearing a ski mask.

Police also said there may have been a fourth person involved, waiting with a getaway car. Detectives said the robbers possibly escaped in a white or gray Chevrolet Citation from the 1980s or earlier.

The violence of Sunday’s robbery is uncommon in the area around the restaurant, which police said is a largely residential community that borders industrial warehouses and offices to the north.

Sgt. Bruce Berg, who supervises community policing in the area, said “crime is really very low here. This is a very nice area. [Violent crime] is very rare.”

But at lunchtime Monday, the events of Sunday night were still evident. The restaurant, near the busy intersection of Sepulveda Boulevard and Normandie Avenue, remained closed. On regular days, local residents, workers from nearby warehouses and police officers would have been coming in for the lunchtime special. Instead, employees filed in Monday to meet with counselors.