Student Life Veers Into Armed Robbery Charges

They hardly seem the usual suspects. She was a prestigious National Merit Scholar, a Los Angeles parochial school product and a gifted poet in her freshman year of college. He was a talented dancer and philosophy major on the verge of earning a bachelor’s degree.

But now Emma Freeman, 18, and Anthony Cristofani, 23, are accused of two armed robberies in this coastal university town. Some have dubbed the young woman from La Crescenta and her boyfriend a collegiate Bonnie and Clyde.

Their seeming detour--from UC Santa Cruz students with a lifetime of promise to potential convicts--makes for a perplexing story, one that has stunned those who know them well.

The case is also a parental nightmare come to life--a daughter departs for college and, four months later, is accused of crimes that could put her behind bars for as much as 26 years.

Evidence against the pair, suspected of robbing a discount warehouse store and a beauty salon, includes a store surveillance video and damaging concessions in the young woman’s diary. Freeman, who faces a preliminary hearing Tuesday, has pleaded not guilty, as have Cristofani and Craig Dickson, a 24-year-old friend accused of driving the getaway car.

“She’s obviously not your average armed robber,” said Douglas Fox, a Santa Cruz attorney representing Freeman. “There’s a quality life at stake here. We need to find out what went wrong in this otherwise perfect picture.”

At UC Santa Cruz, the episode and resulting media scrutiny have the campus cringing. Long stereotyped as a counterculture haven, the university has quietly earned a broader reputation for research accomplishments and academic excellence. Jeff Williams, a junior, said faculty and students “are a little bewildered” over press attention to the arrests.

Police reports of the brief series of crimes sound like low-grade pulp fiction. Paul Meltzer, Cristofani’s attorney in Santa Cruz, called it “a case about extraordinarily bad judgment.”

On Jan. 16, Freeman and Cristofani are accused of strolling into the Emerald Iguana hair salon in neighboring Capitola and holding up a lone stylist. Freeman allegedly brandished a handgun in the caper. “Tell her what you want, honey,” Cristofani reportedly said. The take was less than $100.

A few days later, the duo is suspected of making off with a boombox and a few other electronic items from a Santa Cruz Costco. At the door, a surveillance camera recorded a confrontation with a staffer who tried to stop the unmasked pair. Authorities said the woman robber, outfitted in a Spice Girls T-shirt, leveled a gun and said, “Don’t do anything stupid.”

Victims in the two crimes, police say, were shaken but not injured.

Officers caught up quickly, nabbing the pair at Cristofani’s downtown apartment. Authorities also arrested Dickson, a teaching aide at a local elementary school who roomed with Cristofani. None of the three has a criminal history.

Police say a search of the apartment and Freeman’s dorm room yielded some allegedly stolen items, a Spice Girls T-shirt and a .380-caliber Beretta semiautomatic handgun. Police said Freeman told them the gun wasn’t loaded during the robberies.

What remains to be determined is a motive.

After the arrests, the local news media reported that the pair hoped to avoid having to get jobs that might interfere with their artistic pursuits. Freeman’s attorney plays down that story, suggesting that the real roots will be exposed only through painful introspection. That process has already begun for Freeman, who was released on $150,000 bail and is now staying at her parent’s home.

Police seem to be leaning toward a theory that makes Cristofani, out on $100,000 bail along with Dickson, the architect of the crimes. “We think he pretty much hatched the plot,” said Sgt. Steve Clark of the Santa Cruz police. “She was drawn into it.”

At Freeman’s arraignment last month, prosecutors read a portion of the diary they say details her feelings during the first heist.

“It was very easy,” the entry says. “I don’t really know what to make of it. It was such a foreign experience. It’s kind of scary to remember it and to think of having to do it a lot more.”

The excerpt concludes: “Pulling out the gun and telling her to give us the money was the most surreal experience. Like something that only ever happens in the movies and then suddenly you’re doing it.”

On the advice of her attorney, neither Freeman nor her parents are talking to the press. Freeman’s friends paint the portrait of a protected childhood, complete with private school--Immaculate Heart High in Los Feliz--and ballet lessons. Her father is an executive at Disney, her mother a psychiatric nurse.

Staff members at Immaculate Heart remember the tall, blond girl as a solid student with a command of the arts, particularly dance and the written word. But she began to break away during her senior year, friends say, dressing in the black garb of the “gothic” crowd.

“She got a little more out there,” said Alexis English, a high school friend now at UC Santa Cruz. “But she never did anything really to break the rules. It was more like she just wanted to be recognized.”

Her academic success certainly didn’t wane. She was named a California Arts Scholar, attending the prestigious summer program after her senior year. Instructors say Freeman was never so much as late for class.

“This isn’t someone you would have even thought of as a thrill seeker,” said Robert M. Jaffe, the art program’s director. “She’s a pretty cautious kid who grew up in a pretty sheltered environment, from what I can see.”

Cristofani’s family and friends are also shocked.

A native of the leafy San Jose suburb of Los Gatos, Cristofani is described by friends as a flamboyant fellow, a philosophical merry prankster. He favored bright clothes, often donning orange shoes and silk shirts, and was known to jump atop a table in the cafeteria and dance, or bellow in Italian.

But friends also say Cristofani was studiously nonviolent, the product of a close, financially secure family. “They’re very tight, they’re very warm,” said Kathleen McCowan, who teaches school with Cristofani’s mother. “And from what I know of Anthony he’s very kind and very intelligent.”

Cristofani and Freeman met at a party and quickly became an item. Even in a bastion of tolerance like Santa Cruz, they were considered on the edge. Several students said they were not reluctant to test dorm rules, showering together and pushing the limits of social conduct.

On one occasion during the fall quarter they ditched school for a couple weeks, dorm mates say, taking a road trip through the Western states to follow the rock band Phish.

“I saw her heading for a fall,” said English, Freeman’s high school friend. “I knew something would have to happen before she’d change. But I didn’t think it would be something like this.”

Many of Freeman’s dorm mates conclude that it was Cristofani who helped nudge the college freshman off track. Others question that hypothesis. Ethan Baldinger, a physics major who lived three doors down from Freeman, says she was a morose, confused girl before meeting Cristofani.

“It just isn’t true that he somehow was a bad influence on her, that he corrupted her,” Baldinger said. “He definitely brought out a positive sense in her.”

For administrators at the university, perched atop a panoramic slope overlooking the Pacific, there has been nothing positive out of the episode.

“It just doesn’t do anyone at this campus good to see UC Santa Cruz juxtaposed to the words ‘armed robbery,’ ” said Elizabeth Irwin, spokeswoman at the 11,000-student university. “We have 10,998 other students doing quite well.”

University officials are conducting their own investigation, which could lead to the expulsion of Freeman and Cristofani. But that is the least of the young couple’s worries.

“I’m afraid for her, I’m afraid they’ll throw the book at her, but I don’t think they should,” said Fox, Freeman’s attorney. “If she’s guilty, there is a debt she needs to pay. The question is, how much?”