Valley Travel Agent Recalls Her Fear During Heist

She had overslept and hurried into work to meet a longtime customer who just returned from an Alaskan vacation.

So when she heard a light tap at the door of Fly Moon Travel Services just after 9 a.m. Aug. 14, Lady Moon was expecting the man with his pet Chihuahua and a gift of 6 pounds of halibut.

Instead, standing at the door of her travel agency in the 17000 block of Chatsworth Street were two armed men, later identified by authorities as Jose Rafael Figueroa and Mario Guerrero.

For the next 20 minutes, Moon negotiated for her life with the commodity her attackers wanted most: blank airline tickets.

“I need $1,000 and 1,000 tickets,” Moon recalled one of the men saying repeatedly.

“This is my last day,” she thought. “This is the way it’s going to end.”

One man pulled up his T-shirt, revealing what Moon described as “a big gun, sophisticated and high powered.” She also noticed that the gunman, a heavyset Latino man with a shaved head, was trembling.

He pulled her hair, grabbed her shoulder and shoved her to the back of the travel office where he demanded she open the safe, she said.

Meanwhile, his slim accomplice stood guard at the door.

Moon said she spoke rapidly to the heavyset man, trying to distract him as she slipped her wedding band into a back pocket.

“I did it for my husband, so he would have it when I died,” Moon recounted in an interview.

Moon said she distracted her attackers with sympathetic words and obedience.

Like others in the area, Moon had been warned about a gang of thieves terrorizing travel agencies. But she was caught off guard.

Her attackers emptied the back safe, filling a black plastic bag with 70 blank airline tickets, hundreds of ticket covers, money and her purse.

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As they looted the business, Moon’s expected customer walked in, cradling the dog in one arm and the fish in the other. One of the men hit him in the head and shoved him to the ground.

Unbeknownst to Moon and her customer, the robbers were under surveillance by Los Angeles Police Department detectives, who said later they believed the business was being cased, not robbed.

As officers waited outside, the two men prepared to leave, one holding a gun to Moon’s temple.

“I don’t want to shoot you,” the man said as he warned her not to move. “But if you [do anything], I’m going to kill you.”

They left. But before Moon finished her call to 911, a plainclothes detective appeared at the door.

“I was thinking, why are they so damn fast?”

Minutes later, the suspects would be fatally shot in a confrontation with police.