Oakland baker dies of injuries from brutal robbery
The owner of a cherished Oakland bakery who was severely injured in a robbery Monday died Thursday afternoon, according to an online post from her family and friends.
Angel Cakes owner Jennifer Angel, 48, had been on life support three days after she was dragged more than 50 feet by the car of thieves who cornered and robbed her in the parking lot of a Wells Fargo in Oakland.
Angel’s fiance, Ocean Mottley, told The Chronicle on Thursday that doctors were planning to take Angel off life support imminently to see whether she could breathe on her own.
Shortly before 6 p.m. Angel had been “medically declared to have lost all brain function and will not regain consciousness,” the post said.
“Friends and family of Jen hope that the story of this last chapter of her brilliant, full, dynamic life is one focused on her commitment to community, on the care bestowed upon her and her family by the people who loved her, and on the generous and courageous role of countless health care workers and public servants who fought to preserve her life,” it continued.
The brutality of the robbery, which unfolded on a busy street in broad daylight, has shaken the culinary and political communities Angel was a part of in the Bay Area, where she has longtime roots. The robbery took place on Angel’s day off from her busy work as the owner of the smallbatch cupcake shop and catering business that opened in one of Oakland’s historic Victorian buildings, T.J.’s Gingerbread House.
By Thursday afternoon, more than $90,000 had been raised through GoFundMe to support her family.
Oakland police officials declined Thursday to provide additional details about the attack, which took place around 12:30 p.m. Monday in the parking lot by the 2000 block of Webster Street. They also declined to comment on the status of their investigation. Angel was leaving her parking spot in the lot when a car pulled up in front of her and blocked her from leaving, Mottley told The Chronicle.
A robber broke into her car and grabbed something through the passenger-side window. In a matter of moments, Angel chased after the robbers’ car when she appeared to have gotten caught in the vehicle’s door. The fleeing robbers dragged her for more than 50 feet before she fell into the street, hitting her head multiple several times, her fiance said.
Doctors at Highland Hospital, where she was being treated, attempted to remove her from life support Wednesday, but found that she was unable to breathe on her own.
“She’s the kind of person that if you attack her, she’ll fight back,” said Mottley, 47. “But I wish she would have just let it go. … She would be here with us today.”
Mottley said Angel may have acted the way she did in part due to her perennial worries about finances. She had a “financially insecure” upbringing in the Midwest and “was always scared about money,” he said, referring to how tirelessly she worked to manage the small but mighty operations of her bakery.
Mottley and Angel met almost four years ago to the day at a community event in the Bay Area. Mottley said the two happened to share dozens of friends, so many that they were surprised they hadn’t met earlier in their lives.
“I loved her immediately,” he said, speaking through tears. “She had an amazing presence. We always joke that we knew we were meant to be from our second hug.”
Behind the cultivation of Angel’s unique talent for baking was her lifelong focus on pleasure, he said, with cooking often as a vehicle for it. She founded Angel Cakes in 2008, baking cupcakes, planning wedding, and catering events in the Bay Area. In 2016 she opened the retail store in its current building.
The Oakland bakery intended to remain open, according to friends and family members, “supported by Jen’s estate, and staffed by the talented team that Jen built,” according to their online post.
“She was the consummate organizer,” Mottley said, adding that she had worked as a wedding planner and enjoyed organizing events for friends and community members. “She was an artist in many ways, and I think food is the way she expressed that art.”
She had planned to make dinner for two of her closest friends and their newborn on Tuesday, the day after the accident.
Born in Dearborn, Mich., in 1975, Angel frequently moved on account of her father’s military work, said Mottley. She studied political science and journalism at Ohio State University.
But she cut her teeth in alternative media as a teenager. In 1991, at 16 years old, she created a zine that was widely circulated around Ohio until 2001.
Early issues of the zine, accessible through the Internet Archive, paint a picture of a precocious literary activist with a finger on the pulse of an energetic subculture exploring political identity and sexual freedom.
Angel later began working for Maximum rock’n’roll, a seminal San Francisco punk music magazine founded by legendary leftist activist activist Tim Yohannan.
In 1998, months before Yohannan died, he named Angel as his successor in an interview. Shortly afterward, Angel co-founded her own magazine, a bi-monthly publication called Clamor with her then-husband, Jason Kucsma, that was distributed nationally until 2006.