A fake cop who coaxed a movie theater manager to open the safe at the Krikorian
Buena Park Metroplex 18 was sentenced Thursday in Santa Ana to seven years in state prison.
Fernando Manuel Ruiz, 40, of Los
Angeles, had pleaded guilty in October to multiple felony counts of
second degree robbery and false imprisonment by violence or deceit with
sentencing enhancements for being armed with a deadly weapon and
impersonating a peace officer.
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Around 12:30 p.m. on Aug. 18, 2008, Ruiz walked into the movie theater, asked to see the
manager and showed the employee a badge and business card of a Buena Park
Police Department investigator. Ruiz said he was investigating a previous robbery and asked the
manager to show him the serial numbers on the money
inside the safe. After viewing the serial numbers on the cash
inside the manager's office, Ruiz stepped outside to make
several cell phone calls.
Minutes later, Ruiz returned to the office, pulled out a gun and pointed it at the
manager, who was ordered to the ground while the worker's wrists were bound with a
telephone cord. A female theater employee then walked in and she, too, was tied up with
a computer mouse cord. Before leaving with $7,000 in cash, Ruiz collected the theater's
surveillance footage and destroyed it.
But as investigators would discover, the gunman left latex gloves that provided DNA evidence. In August 2010, as part of a misdemeanor conviction for filing a false vehicle registration, Ruiz had to give up a DNA sample. When that was entered into the crime database, a hit came back for the movie theater robbery from two years before.
Fernando Manuel Ruiz Allegedly Impersonated a Cop Investigating a Robbery to Rob Movie Theater
If Ruiz had been convicted after pleading not guilty, the maximum punishment he would have faced was 20 years in 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.