California Jewelry Store Employees Fend Of Smash And Grabbers Armed With Hammers With Knuckle Sandwiches

Employees punched, kicked and weaponized a chair to fight off thieves armed with hammers during an attempted smash-and-grab heist on Sunday at a jewelry store in the Bella Terra shopping center in Huntington Beach.

The thieves bolted into Princess Bride Diamonds at 7821 Edinger Ave around noon, police said. Four people dressed in dark clothing immediately used a hammer to smash a display case, as seen in surveillance footage the store shared in an Instagram story.

The intruders had pulled into the outdoor mall’s parking lot in a Honda, said an employee at a nearby store who declined to give his name for safety reasons. He said he saw three or four people wearing ski masks and carrying hammers get out of the car. One of them was carrying a backpack with a camouflage print.

“As soon as I saw them get out of the car, I knew they were going to rob Princess Bride,” he said.

They came and went, he said, in under a minute.

As the masked thieves ransacked the store, two employees rushed at them and exchanged blows, knocking one intruder to the ground, the video shows. Another staff member carrying a chair ran toward the melee and struck one of the thieves with it as they attempted to flee.

“We fought back and are ok,” someone from the store wrote in the intro to the Instagram video.”Fortunately they were not able to get anything thanks to our awesome team.”

Justin Lowrie said he was in a garden near the jewelry store when he and several others heard the sound of glass being smashed.

“Some of us ran, thinking the glass breaking was gunshots,” he said.

Brian Lam was working at SomiSomi, an ice cream shop next to the jewelry store, when he heard three loud noises, and then saw one person wearing something covering his face running south toward the parking lot. Lam later peeked inside Princess Bride and saw at least two display glass display cases had been shattered.

Nobody was hurt, according to a woman who answered the phone at the jewelry store on Sunday afternoon.

A description of what, if anything, was taken was not immediately available.

Another smash-and-grab occurred about an hour later in Santa Ana, at Don Roberto’s Jewelry Store on the 1600 block of West 17th Street, Santa Ana Police Sgt. Maria Lopez said. Four thieves managed to take $7,000 worth of merchandise from the business.