A 35-year-old man who allegedly rode a motorized scooter through a Santa Ana grocery store before getting up and robbing the manager was charged with several felonies Monday, according to police, who add he faces several more counts for a violent apartment invasion.
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Surveillance video from Food 4 Less, 2140 S. Bristol St., Santa Ana, on Sept. 18 showed a large man sitting in scooter as he rode through the aisles before he stood up, grabbed the manager from behind and put him in a headlock.
According to Santa Ana Police, the robber forced the manager into an office, where the store chief and a bookkeeper were ordered to fill a backpack with cash. The thief then took the manager's car keys, had the manager lead him to a 2001 Toyota Echo and drove off in the vehicle, police say.
Television news reports, which included rolling the Food 4 Less surveillance video, spurred someone to call and say it appeared to be Antonio Delgado Juarez on screen. So police set about looking for him. They did not have to go far: He was already in jail in connection with the Sept. 22 break-in of a Santa Ana apartment that turned violent.
Someone broke into a truck near the apartment, did not take anything and then busted into the apartment, where he was confronted by the tenant and his daughter, according to Cpl. Anthony Bertagna, the Santa Ana Police spokesman.
With only one way out, the intruder knocked the tenant down and hit the resident several times before leaving, said Bertagna, who added a man who was quickly caught and arrested with the help of a police helicopter was later identified as Juarez.
Based on the Food 4 Less evidence, officers searched Juarez's home and seized more than $2,700 in cash, according to Bertagna, who noted the stolen Toyota was not found.
By the way, Juarez gets around just fine without the aid of a scooter.
For the Food 4 Less incident, he faces two counts of second-degree robbery, a count of second-degree burglary, carjacking, kidnapping for carjacking and kidnapping to commit robbery, all felonies. For the apartment incident, he is charged with single counts each of first-degree burglary and second-degree burglary as well as three counts of vandalism, all felonies, and misdemeanor assault, battery and possession of burglary tools.
If convicted of all that, you'd expect he might need a power scooter by the time he gets out of prison.
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OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.