Muggings at gunpoint on the rise in Oakland
When he left the poker game at his friend’s house on Santa Clara Avenue, just up the road from Grand Lake Theatre in Oakland, Randy Lyman was up $12.
Around 12:30 a.m. on Jan. 18, Lyman did what he always does after games, win or lose:
He walked home. It usually takes about 20 minutes on Grand Avenue, and everything was fine until Lyman reached the corner of Bellevue Avenue, a block he’s lived on for almost two decades.
Before he had time to react,
he was on the ground with a gun in his face. Lyman was mugged. After celebrating historic crime lows in 2018, Oakland had a 7% increase in combined homicides, aggravated assaults, rapes and robberies in 2019. Seven definitely isn’t a lucky number here.
There were 6,365 violent crimes reported in 2019, a 7% increase from the 5,924 in 2018. Robberies also increased 7% — from 2,588 to 2,776. Robberies were still below the fiveyear average of 2,828, but a slew of violent robberies in the past month have left victims and neighborhoods shaken.
“I’m still feeling it,” Lyman, 59, told me four days after the mugging. “I didn’t want to leave my apartment the last couple of nights. I still feel violated.”
We were at Perch, a cafe on Grand. We could see the spot of the assault from our seats. Lyman said he skipped the yoga class he walks to at night, and instead of taking a leisurely walk from 19th Street BART Station at night, he’ll now take a Lyft.
As we talked, I kept thinking this could happen to anyone who likes to walk around Oakland. Like me. The reality is that it could happen to you, too.
I find myself looking over my shoulder more on latenight walks. Lyman wasn’t looking over his, because he was almost home. And the sidewalk in front of the Avé Vista Apartments, the building that stretches to the corner of Grand and Bellevue avenues, is brightly lit.
As Lyman turned right onto Bellevue, he noticed a man walking toward Grand. Something about his demeanor caused Lyman to look over his shoulder.
“I saw him turn and start to follow me,” he said.
Lyman took a step to run and slammed into another man. He was sandwiched. The first guy punched Lyman in the face, knocking him to the ground. The second man stood over Lyman and pointed a gun at him.
“Give me your wallet,” the gunman said calmly.
Lyman also handed over the iPhone 11 Pro he’d gotten just days earlier. Then the men walked to a black getaway car idling on the street.
Quick and easy. In and out. The robbers were practiced, and they didn’t fear getting caught by police.
“This is like their day job at night,” Lyman said of the robbers who drove up Bellevue toward Van Buren Avenue.
Lyman, the interim national communications coordinator for the Coalition of Kaiser Permanente Unions, posted about his experience on the social media site Nextdoor, where robberies with getaway drivers are a hot topic. One person commented on Lyman’s post that the same thing had happened to them. And get this: Hours after Lyman was robbed, there was a similar robbery in the parking lot at Gogi Time on Telegraph Avenue. Two robbers were spirited away in a black car.
Wait, are stickup crews roaming Oakland?
“The simplest answer is yes,” said Lt. Steven Nowak of the Oakland Police Department. “We have a few similars, but we haven’t actually made that connection yet.
“The M.O., the descriptions are similar, but then again we’ve had it to where we’ve had similarities and later on during the course of the investigation we’ve disproved them.”
It was a crew that targeted Shuo Zeng on Dec. 31 as he worked on his laptop at a Starbucks in Montclair. Zeng chased the two people who had snatched his computer before he was fatally hit and dragged by the getaway vehicle.
Less than two weeks later, a laptop theft left a robbery victim injured with a gunshot wound.
And just last week, a doorbell security video captured a woman screaming as she was robbed at gunpoint at the front door of her Oakland hills apartment. The robber had an accomplice, as seen in the graphic video first reported by KTVU.
Look, we’re living in desperate times. Racial and social inequities are inescapable in Oakland, a city where the unhoused sometimes die hungry and cold on our streets. I’ve met homeless people who told me they’ve busted car windows looking for something to sell so they could eat. Auto burglaries are on the rise in Oakland. But breaking a window and swiping a snowboard from an unoccupied car, as happened to a friend while we were at dinner recently, isn’t the same as sticking someone up.
Oakland has to round up the crews stalking neighborhoods like Rockridge, Longfellow and Fruitvale. They’ve become more brazen. They’ve become more violent.
“When we actually see an uptick in certain areas and hot spots, we do implement special patrols,” Nowak said. “We use our special resource squads.”
After he was robbed, Lyman couldn’t immediately call police because he didn’t have a phone or a landline in his apartment. He went back to his friend’s house to secure his bank accounts, and he filed a police report online.
Later, he went to Best Buy to get a home phone. He told the cashier his story.
“You’re the second guy that said that to me this week,” Lyman said the cashier responded.