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A pair of young lovers have been accused of robbing four Los Angeles cannabis dispensaries during a six-week-long crime spree last year, according to authorities.
Gabriella Tovar and Jesus Mendoza, both in their twenties, had only been dating for one month before they embarked on a string of heists at unlicensed weed shops around the city that came to an abrupt on June 11, 2023, when Mendoza crashed his BMW after a high-speed chase with cops, Los Angeles Police Department officers said during a four-day preliminary court hearing in late August.
Deputy District Attorney Justin Schultz told the Los Angeles Times in an interview that unlicensed dispensaries are “the perfect victim,” because vendors are reluctant to go to the police to report a robbery.
“You have bosses who are many, many levels removed — in other words, the employees don’t know who they’re working for,” he told the Los Angeles Times in an interview.
The pair were intially charged with 14 counts of kidnapping, robbery, fleeing police, committing assault with machine guns and shooting into an occupied building. At the end of the hearing — where the couple sat at a table with an LAPD file labeled “Romeo and Juliet” — the shooting charge and one count of robbery were dropped.
Prosecutors claimed Mendoza had been fired from the first dispensary they attempted to rob, Up in Smoke. Samantha Vargas, an employee there, said she was working in the shop on the night of April 24, 2023, when she noticed a BMW reverse toward the back door on security cameras.
Vargas testified that upon unlocking the back door, a masked Tovar grabbed a fistful of her hair and yanked her to the ground before she was dragged to the weed shop’s bathroom.
There, Vargas said she and two other employees were held at gunpoint by a suspect, whom she identified as Mendoza, while Tovar and a third suspect grabbed cannabis from the sales area.
Tovar’s attorney implied that Vargas was a conspirator in the robbery, claiming she had not identified either Tovar or Mendoza as suspects when interviewed by police the night of the robbery. Vargas denied the allegation.
A month later, three masked suspects toting guns, including an AK-47, held up employees at Daily Dose, with a female robber snatching bags of weed from a safe. They later retuned to rob the shop again, police said.
Just hours after the second robbery at Daily Dose, a male suspect with an assault rifle and a woman with a handgun rolled up in their BMW to the illegal dispensary Fire House. The man shot off the shop’s lock at the woman’s direction, workers told authorities, and instructed employees to start loading up the BMW with cannabis products.
But their luck ran out. During that robbery, an LAPD patrol car pulled up outside, and Mendoza allegedly tossed aside the AK-47 before jumping into a BMW and blowing through stop signs as he drove on the wrong side of the road in an attempt to escape. Seven miles later, Mendoza crashed.
Tovar was arrested 11 days later, on suspicion of kidnapping and robbery, with LAPD Detective Douglas Johnson, the lead detective on the case, testifying that authorities are still searching for other suspects.
