Cynthia
Ongamsing-Jenkins, 43, of Tustin, was sentenced Wednesday to two years and eight months in state prison for falsely claiming to be the victim of armed robberies of Rite Aid stores in Costa Mesa and Dana Point she supervised.
Ongamsing-Jenkins had pleaded guilty Feb. 24 to two
felony counts of grand theft.
She was working as a supervisor at the Rite
Aid at 2300 Harbor Blvd., Costa Mesa, the night of Nov. 11, 2007, when she reported to police that she and another
employee had been robbed.
Responding cops were told two armed men walked
into the store and ordered her and the other
employee to give them the cash from the register and store safe. Her co-worker was forced at gunpoint into the store cooler before the robbers left with about $5,500.
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Surveillance video caught the robbery, but the gunmen were not identified.
Then, while working as the floor supervisor at the Rite Aid at 24829 Del Prado in Dana Point on June 20, 2009, Ongamsing-Jenkins told sheriff's deputies she was approached by a
man while walking through the parking lot of a Bank of America with a deposit bag from the drug store.
The man pushed her to the ground and stole the deposit bag with about $20,000 inside, she told deputies. That
robbery was also captured by a security camera.
But Orange County Sheriff's Department investigators discovered two suspicious text messages
on Ongamsing-Jenkins cell phone that showed she was involved
in the planning of the staged Dana Point robbery.
Under questioning, she confessed to having set up both robberies.
The men in the surveillance videos have not been identified, according to the Orange County District Attorney's Office.
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.