‘Romeo and Juliet’: L.A. couple accused of wielding AK-47 in brazen string of dispensary heists
Gabriella Tovar and Jesus Mendoza did things any 20-somethings in love might do. They took selfies together, sneaked into each other’s workplaces to hang out, spent all night driving around the city.
It was the couple’s other activities, police say, that landed them in a downtown Los Angeles courtroom in late August, shackled and dressed in blue jumpsuits, charged with 14 counts of kidnapping, robbery, fleeing police, committing assault with machine guns and shooting into an occupied building.
During a four-day preliminary hearing, Los Angeles Police Department detectives asserted that Tovar and Mendoza targeted four cannabis dispensaries for robberies — including one they allegedly held up on consecutive days — during a six-week-long string of heists that ended June 11, 2023, when Mendoza crashed his BMW after a high-speed chase.
Authorities have characterized the two as partners in romance and in crime. At the end of the courtroom table where they sat chained to their chairs was a binder containing the LAPD’s investigative file. It was labeled “Romeo and Juliet.”
Testimony and video of the takeover-style heists offered a startling example of the violence that shadows California’s booming cannabis black market.
The couple are accused of robbing unlicensed dispensaries, which sell pot at cheaper prices than legal businesses by dodging taxes and state testing requirements. Deputy Dist. Atty. Justin Schultz said the cash-only dispensaries are targets for extortion and robbery because illegal operators are less likely to go to the police.
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“You have the perfect victim,” Schultz said in an interview. “The bud-tenders are reluctant to cooperate because they work for an illegal business. You have bosses who are many, many levels removed — in other words, the employees don’t know who they’re working for.”
At the end of the hearing, Tovar and Mendoza were held to answer on all charges but those of shooting into an occupied building and a robbery count that prosecutors dropped.
Defense lawyers argued that the pair may be guilty of robbery but not kidnapping, which carries up to a life sentence. Prosecutors filed the charge on the basis that Tovar and Mendoza moved dispensary employees against their will when they herded them from room to room at gunpoint.
Attorneys for both defendants declined a request from The Times for comment.
A baby-faced 24-year-old, Mendoza has tattoos that peeked out above the neckline of his jumpsuit: a skull on the right side of his neck, Asian characters on the other.
Tovar, 29, wore a white rosary over her county blues, her long black hair teased up and make-up immaculate. Both defendants have been jailed in lieu of $4 million bail since their arrests.
They began dating about a month before the first robbery, which targeted a dispensary in Van Nuys where Mendoza was employed as a security guard, Schultz said. Tovar had worked at the shop but been fired, the prosecutor said.
Called “Up In Smoke,” the illegal shop on Vanowen Street was being powered by a generator because authorities had shut off the building’s electricity, an employee testified.
The employee, Samantha Vargas, said she was inside the shop on the night of April 24, 2023, watching the security cameras when she noticed a BMW reverse toward the back door. Then everything went pitch-black. Vargas testified that she thought someone must have unplugged the generator.
Then, Vargas said, she heard hammering at the back door and shouts to open up. She testified she heard a voice she recognized as Tovar say, “Shoot these b—!”
A month earlier, Vargas had exchanged messages with Tovar on Instagram after bumping into her at the dispensary.
“You are so cute dude,” Tovar wrote, according to messages shown in court.
Vargas unlocked the back door. She testified that Tovar — who was wearing a face mask and hooded sweatshirt — grabbed a fistful of her hair and yanked her to the ground.
Dragged to the shop’s bathroom, Vargas said, she and two other employees were held there at gunpoint by a suspect whom she identified as Mendoza. Tovar and a third suspect grabbed cannabis from the sales area, using their phones as flashlights to illuminate the shop, Vargas said.
During the hearing, Tovar’s attorney seized on the fact that Vargas did not identify his client or Mendoza as suspects when she spoke to police the night of the robbery. He implied she was in on the heist — an allegation Vargas denied.
About a month after that robbery, Officer Victor Ramos testified, the LAPD responded to one at the Daily Dose.
An employee told officers that he had been closing down for the night when three suspects wearing masks and carrying guns approached the shop on Western Avenue. One held an AK-47, an assault rifle with a distinctive curved magazine, he said.
Detectives obtained footage from the shop’s surveillance system that showed the suspects pushing the employees inside the business at gunpoint. While the workers lay on their stomachs, a robber who appeared to be female grabbed bags of cannabis from a safe, the video shows.
The following morning, Sergio Alvarez showed up to Rocket Buds, a dispensary on Adams Boulevard where he worked as a bud-tender. Alvarez said he unlocked the front door and was talking to the security guard in the sales area when they heard an argument in the lobby.
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The guard went to investigate. Then he came running back. “We’re about to get robbed,” he told Alvarez.
“I said, ‘What do you mean?’” Alvarez recalled. “Literally as soon as I asked him that, I saw bullets coming through the wall.”
Alvarez said he and the guard hit the ground. “We didn’t know if they had got in,” he said. “It was quiet. It was a little too quiet.”
Alvarez testified that when he peered through a tinted window into the lobby, it was empty and littered with shell casings.
Security footage showed what appeared to be two men and a woman enter the lobby. One fired a barrage from an automatic rifle into the locked security door and a second suspect opened fire with a handgun. After trying and failing to kick in the door, the trio left.
At 11:45 that same night, the LAPD was called back to the Daily Dose. This time the shop’s cameras captured two suspects — described by investigators as a man armed with a rifle and a woman carrying a handgun — walking an employee to the safe at gunpoint. After opening it, the worker stood with his hands in the air as one suspect took out all the cannabis, the video showed.
While searching Mendoza’s iCloud account, LAPD Det. Douglas Johnson testified, he found a video filmed about an hour after the second robbery at the Daily Dose. The video, which was played in court, showed stacks of $100 bills, bags of cannabis and an assault rifle.
On Tovar’s iCloud, Johnson found a series of videos that were played in court. Selfies and photographs of fancy cocktails were interspersed with images of white powder on a scale, a rifle on a pink bedspread and a Pomeranian lying next to a handgun.
Less than nine hours after the second heist at the Daily Dose, prosecutors say, Mendoza and Tovar robbed Fire House, an illegal dispensary on Valley Boulevard in El Sereno. Employees were waiting for a manager to let them in when a BMW pulled up to the curb.
Two people stepped out, employees told police: a man with an assault rifle and a woman with a handgun.
The workers told the pair they didn’t have keys to the front door. The female suspect, Det. Frank Flores testified, told the male suspect to shoot off the lock. According to what employees told police, she seemed to be in charge, Flores said.
The male suspect raked the door with the rifle, blowing off the lock, Detective Christian Mrakich testified. Told to gather as much merchandise as they could carry, the employees were loading up the BMW when an LAPD patrol car pulled up outside the dispensary, surveillance video showed. Two officers stepped out with their guns drawn.
The suspect, identified by police as Mendoza, tossed aside the AK-47 and got in the BMW, Mrakich testified. As police gave chase, the female suspect dropped her gun on the sidewalk, peeled off her mask and walked away.
Officer Eduardo Chavez testified that he pursued the BMW for seven miles. Dash-cam footage showed the SUV sped off with its trunk still open — blowing through stop signs and weaving around stopped cars by driving on the wrong side of the road — before it finally crashed in downtown Los Angeles.
Tovar was arrested 11 days later, on suspicion of kidnapping and robbery. Johnson, the lead detective on the case, testified that authorities are still pursuing additional suspects — including a third robber who took part in the Rocket Buds heist.
Before she was taken into custody, Tovar surreptitiously recorded several calls to a female dispensary employee who her lawyer claimed was complicit.
To hear Tovar’s attorney tell it, the heists were inside jobs set up by workers who made it appear they were victims. Detectives found on Mendoza’s iCloud surveillance footage of two of the robberies — evidence police thought only they had obtained.
In one recorded call, Tovar told the female employee that she hoped she hadn’t hit her too hard but had to make the robbery seem real. Her lawyer, Alex Kessel, turned over the calls to the LAPD.
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Johnson testified he didn’t think the tapes made Tovar any less culpable.
“It sounded like Ms. Tovar was trying to elicit statements to help her case,” he said.
Detectives tested the handgun abandoned outside Fire House, finding Tovar’s DNA on the handle and trigger guard. They never found the AK-47.
An employee told detectives the dispensary’s operators told him to throw the gun off a pier in Long Beach. The LAPD sent out divers. They came back empty-handed.
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