The brazen gun store burglaries began in earnest in June 2024 and always went down the same way. In the predawn darkness, a driver would smash a stolen sedan through a shop’s storefront, then masked men would rush in, shatter display cases, fill bags with looted guns and flee in a different getaway vehicle. The heists lasted just minutes each.
Read more Republicans decry a new Democratic Socialists of America platform as Dem primaries split the party
All told, the crew stole at least 312 guns from six licensed firearms dealers in four Southern California counties, prosecutors said. The burglars stole 78 guns from Poway Weapons and Gear and 33 more from Firearms Unknown in Oceanside. There were also three failed heists, including one at Fallbrook Guns and Ammo.
The weapons ended up on the black market, and in the months that followed turned up at crime scenes and in the possession of documented gang members and suspected drug dealers across Southern California, according to court records. Most troubling, two handguns stolen from Poway Weapons and Gear ended up in the hands of Los Angeles murder victims — one of them literally in the cold palm of a man shot dead in an apartment.
The burglary spree resulted in at least two federal prosecutions, one in Los Angeles, near where most of the thieves lived, and another in Las Vegas, where at least 35 guns turned up just hours after they were stolen in Poway.
Later this week, the final two of seven defendants in the main Los Angeles case are set to be sentenced for their roles in what federal prosecutors described as a “wild and reckless” crime spree. The government attorneys said the actions of the young men traumatized both the gun sellers whose stores were smashed and looted after hours, and the victims whose cars were stolen to use as battering rams.
The thieves “engaged in acts of carnage throughout Southern California … (that) left behind totaled cars, immense amounts of property damage, and stolen firearms that would end up in the hands of gang members and criminals,” prosecutors wrote.
A federal judge in Los Angeles has already sentenced five thieves to terms ranging from four years in prison down to four years of probation with no prison time. The judge has also ordered the defendants to pay restitution in amounts as high as $761,000. Prosecutors are recommending a three-year prison term and a one-year prison term for the final two thieves set to be sentenced Friday.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office in Los Angeles declined to comment on the case or answer questions about the sentences it has sought.
But even as those final two sentencings will close one chapter of the case, there is no telling how long the stolen guns, most of them semiautomatic pistols, will continue to plague the streets of Southern California.
As of February 2025 — 11 months after the burglary in Poway and nine months after the one in Oceanside — law enforcement officers around Southern California had recovered 12 guns stolen from the two San Diego County shops at crime scenes or in the possession of suspected criminals or crime victims, according to a report by the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives that is part of the court record.
That included two guns stolen from Firearms Unknown that ended up with documented Crip gang members in two separate incidents, and the two from Poway Weapons and Gear that ended up with murder victims, according to the ATF report.
In July 2024, four months after the Poway burglary, a man was killed inside his Los Angeles home. During the murder investigation, his widow gave police a gun that she said her husband had acquired just before his death. It was a 9 mm pistol stolen from Poway, according to the ATF report.
Read more Trump demands Senate cancel August break until it passes voting bill
Another 9 mm handgun stolen from Poway Weapons and Gear was “found in the hand of the victim” when a man was fatally shot by another person in October 2024 inside a Los Angeles apartment, according to the ATF report.
Although seven of the burglaries happened during a one-month period in June and July of 2024, the spree technically began about eight months earlier, in October 2023, when members of the same crew made off with 43 guns from Chaparral Coin and Gun in Murrieta.
For months, that heist appeared to be a one-off incident. But about five months later, in the early morning of March 25, 2024, a stolen Hyundai Elantra slammed through the front of Poway Weapons and Gear, a popular gun store and shooting range located off Scripps Poway Parkway. Four masked thieves rushed in and stole more than six dozen guns, which would end up being the largest haul of the entire spree. They fled in a silver Chevrolet SUV.
According to court documents in both the Los Angeles and Las Vegas cases, the thieves drove the SUV to a home in Lake Elsinore, then one of the men continued with the vehicle up Interstate 15 to Nevada.
Later that same day, ATF agents determined the SUV was a loaner that an auto shop near Las Vegas had given to a customer while his vehicle was undergoing repairs. The auto shop was able to track the SUV to a home in Las Vegas, where local police officers soon recovered 35 of the 78 guns stolen earlier that day in Poway and arrested four men on charges related to transporting and trafficking the weapons. Those arrested in Las Vegas were not directly involved with the burglary that morning.
According to his plea agreement in the Los Angeles case, the man who had been given the loaner SUV was one of the four Poway burglars. He admitted in his plea agreement that he also took part in a July 13 burglary at a gun store in Orange County.
By that time, members of the crew had burglarized or attempted to burglarize seven more gun stores in a one-month span. It started early one morning in mid-June, when they unsuccessfully sought to break into a San Bernardino County gun shop. The next morning, they were again unsuccessful when they tried to hit Fallbrook Guns and Ammo.
But on June 17, they rammed a stolen sedan through the front of Firearms Unknown off Oceanside Boulevard, making off with 33 guns. The next morning, it was a gun shop in Riverside, where they looted 25 guns. A few weeks later, in early July, they nabbed 63 guns from a shop in Ventura County, while a second burglary about a week later in Ventura County was unsuccessful.
By that time, investigators were hot on the burglars’ trail and had identified several individuals involved in at least some of the heists. As the young thieves posted photos of stolen guns, cash from gun sales and other incriminating evidence on Instagram, investigators were watching and documenting that evidence.
Finally, on July 13, the burglars pulled off one final heist, making off with 70 guns from Fowler’s Gun Room in the city of Orange. They returned to the Lake Elsinore home where several of the burglars lived together, but investigators also arrived a short time later. Inside the home, investigators found dozens of guns stolen earlier that morning, as well as weapons stolen in several of the previous burglaries. Investigators also found clothes and equipment that matched such items from surveillance footage of the prior heists.
Read more Comey says seashells post was political speech — not a threat — as he presses to dismiss charges
