Opinion ID: 844204
Heading Depth: 4
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: Robbery at Thomas Realtors

Text: Thomas Realtors is a San Diego property management company. According to Jacqueline Graff, who worked as a receptionist there in April 1996, 14 most of the tenants‟ rent payments came into the office on the 3d and 4th of each month. Graff testified that on April 3 around 2:20 p.m., two African-American men entered the office. One of them, whose description matched that of defendant, put a gun to her head and demanded that she open the desk drawer and give him all of the money. Graff explained that the owner had taken the money to the bank. However, she complied with the robber‟s demands to open all of the drawers and he rifled through them, saying, “Somebody is going to die if I don‟t get the money.” The assailants then turned their attention to Graff‟s coworker, Paul Baumhoefner, who had come to the lobby to see what the commotion was about. Baumhoefner testified that the man with the gun held the weapon inches from his face, demanding money and backing him into his private office. Like Graff, Baumhoefner explained that the owner was on his way to the bank, and he opened all of his desk drawers to show that there was no money inside. He also pulled out a wad of money from his pockets, which the gunman grabbed before leaving the office and heading out the front door. Baumhoefner then retrieved the owner‟s gun from another desk and ran out the door in pursuit. He got into his truck and took off after a red sedan that bystanders had identified as the getaway car. Baumhoefner eventually pulled up behind the car and noted its license plate number, then returned to the office and reported the number to responding officers. The commotion on the street near the scene of the robbery had attracted Thomas Stone‟s attention as he was driving by. Stone testified that he saw bystanders pointing at a red car, which he followed as it made its way down various streets and alleys. When the car stopped in an alley, a large AfricanAmerican man emerged from the passenger side and started shooting at Stone as Stone tried to back up, hitting his vehicle in several places. 15 The parties stipulated that two days after the incident, police located a sedan with a license plate number matching the one reported by Paul Baumhoefner, and that one of the four latent fingerprints recovered from the vehicle was positively identified as belonging to defendant. The prosecution‟s firearms expert testified that the .380-caliber casings recovered from the scene of the shooting could have been fired from the Lorcin handgun, and that cartridges found in the alley were the same kind as those recovered from the scene of the Shawn Boyd shooting six weeks earlier.