For more than 12 hours Tuesday, police thought they had an armed robber cornered at a 7-Eleven in the heart of downtown Long Beach. Cops on loudspeakers ordered him to come out. Officers lobbed tear gas. SWAT team members parked armored vehicles outside. Rifle-toting police even scaled the roof and scoured next-door businesses in case he’d managed to get through the ceiling or walls.
He eluded them all — and managed to come away a few hundred dollars richer, according to a nearby shop owner. Mike Rosetti, who runs Broadway Pizza, says he has security camera footage and an empty till to prove it.
Rosetti lost a full day of business as police staked out the corner at Pine Avenue and Broadway. His shop is two doors down from the 7-Eleven where police say a gunman showed up around 2 a.m., sending employees running out of the store to flag down nearby cops.
As the ensuing standoff dragged on, Rosetti wasn’t able to get back into his business until Tuesday afternoon. When he did, he said, it stank of tear gas. There was a broken ceiling tile — he presumed left by SWAT officers who’d searched inside — and dirty towels strewn on the ground.
He started cleaning up and didn’t think much more of it until Wednesday, when he entered his back office and saw papers oddly shuffled around. Minutes later, one of his employees told him there was no cash in the register.
That’s when Rosetti checked his security cameras and saw something he said was chilling.
Around 5:30 p.m. Tuesday — after officers had given up the hunt — a man Rosetti assumes is the robber walked in through the rear door of Broadway Pizza. Rosetti had left it open, hoping to air out the tear gas smell. He’d unwittingly given the robber access to the restaurant from a rear stairwell that connects to a closed-down nightclub and shared storage space on the building’s second floor.
Rosetti is pretty sure the armed thief hid out in the stairwell and storage room for more than 12 hours while police searched the 7-Eleven, Broadway Pizza and the Pinkberry in between them.
Rosetti’s video showed the man was able to casually stroll into his pizza shop Tuesday evening, grab an employee’s backpack, fill it with cash and retreat to the stairwell — all while Rosetti and one of his workers were just a few feet away in another room.
Later that day, still unaware, Rosetti locked up the stairwell door. He thinks the armed man was hiding inside, just a few feet away. Rosetti said he isn’t sure where the robber went after he closed the door, but there’s an exit to the alleyway from the stairwell, making it trivially easy for him to sneak away once it got dark.
Rosetti doesn’t have cameras in the storage area, so he’s not positive how the man got there, but he’s got a pretty good idea.
Up until 2013, Rosetti also owned the nightclub above Broadway Pizza. He accessed both through the shared stairwell and storage room. If the robber pushed up one of the roof panels in the 7-Eleven, he would’ve been able to get into the Pinkberry next door, which also connects to the stairwell and storage area.
After watching the camera footage and realizing how much danger he’d been in, Rosetti said he couldn’t sleep Wednesday night.
“I told my girlfriend when I got home, that guy could have shot me,” he said.
It’s not clear if police ever tried to search the stairwell or storage area.
In a statement, the LBPD said it “is reviewing and analyzing the recent video to determine if the armed suspect was able to avoid being located during the extensive and systematic public safety search conducted by our department. While extremely rare, no search is 100% conclusive and there are instances in which suspects have been able to evade law enforcement either from a secure location within the search perimeter or by escaping from the perimeter at some point during the incident.”
“Our SWAT Detail is one of the best in our nation,” the statement continued.
Since the standoff, Mary Zendejas, the City Council member who represents the area, said she’s requested more police patrols in downtown.
Zendejas also wrote that she expects “a robust investigation” into what unfolded.
Editor’s note: This story was updated with a statement from the Long Beach Police Department.