Store Owner Shot, Suspect Killed in Botched Holdup

Police are searching for a robber who fought a gun battle with a Tujunga shopkeeper and fled after his accomplice was fatally wounded.

The accomplice, a man possibly in his 20s who has not been identified, died of gunshot wounds before police arrived at Canyon Market just before midnight Monday, said Los Angeles Police Det. Frank Bishop.

Ralph J. Gambina, the 46-year-old proprietor of a family-owned convenience store at Hillrose Street and Tujunga Canyon Boulevard, suffered a single bullet wound to his upper body, police and family members said. He was in serious but stable condition Tuesday.

“It looks like a robbery that went bad,” said Det. Miles Taylor. Gambina, he said, apparently acted in self-defense.

For the Gambinas, who live in San Clemente and have owned the store in the quiet Tujunga neighborhood for more than 20 years, it was a nightmare relived.

In 1981, Ralph’s father, Salvatore Ted Gambina, was gunned down in the grocery store he owned in South-Central Los Angeles, family members said.

On Monday, just as Ralph Gambina was preparing to close for the day, two armed men walked in and demanded money, police said. After the robbers took money from the cash register, they demanded that Gambina open his safe. Sometime after that, a battle with handguns ensued.

“I thought it was firecrackers,” said a neighbor, who asked not to be identified.

Another neighbor, who declined to be identified, said: “It was just dead silent after the gunshots. I didn’t hear a car or anything.”

The dead man was wearing jeans and a gray sweatshirt with its drawstring hood pulled over his face, Taylor said. Police had no description of the other robber and said they don’t know if he escaped with money.

At the hospital, Gambina’s wife, Leslie, said she saw her husband cry and ask for a priest because he was so upset that a man had died.

“He knows what it’s like to lose somebody,” she said. “Everybody has a mother. He’s sad for [the dead man’s] family.”

Because the store is in a residential neighborhood away from other shops and busy traffic, the robbery surprised some residents as well as officers.

“There’s very little violent crime here,” said Don Muniz, the LAPD’s senior lead officer for the neighborhood.

But other neighbors and Gambina family members said the store had several attempted robberies in the last few years.

“That’s why he had the gun,” Leslie Gambina said.

Some neighbors questioned whether Gambina should have had a gun, but police noted that the law permits store owners to keep firearms.

“You’re allowed to have a gun in your own residence or business,” said Bishop, the LAPD detective.

Friends and family members described Gambina as an extremely hard-working man who tried to keep his store open every day of the year, often sleeping in a trailer behind the shop to avoid long commutes home to San Clemente.

Police are asking anyone with information about the crime to call Foothill Division detectives at (818) 834-3115 or, after hours, at (818) 756-8861.