Residents Strike Back at Rise In Crime Rate

A meeting hosted by a group of residents calling themselves Citizens for A Safe San Marino drew more than 175 people to San Marino High School’s Webb Theatre this past on a quest for answers to this city’s alarming increase in burglaries and other assorted crimes.
Dr. Ghassan Roumani, who has lived in town for more than three decades and founded the group, opened the 2-hour program by showing clips from a CBS2 television segment that focused on San Marino’s crime problem and was interspersed with disturbing surveillance video that showed burglars roaming through the community’s homes and properties.
“We were shocked when we saw this,” said Roumani, breaking the silence that had overtaken the auditorium.
Roumani then explained his personal experience, when squatters moved into an unoccupied home next door to his own and existed for several weeks before they were arrested. He then displayed a graphic which explained the rise in local burglaries of more than 60%. San Marino experienced experienced 50 such crimes in all of 2016. To the date that data was collected for the meeting, there have been 81 since January.
“And a lot more since,” said Dr. Roumani.
He then handed the show over to his daughter Nadia, a professor of design at Stanford University.
“This town is very important to me,” she said. “What are the underlying reasons for this?” she asked rhetorically. “What are the root causes?”
She then offered data showing that most burglaries in San Marino take place between the hours of 10:00 a.m. and 4:00 p.m. and that perpetrators tend to enter homes through back doors, focusing on a home’s second story (which is far less likely to include alarm systems) and master bedrooms, where cash, safes and jewelry are more commonly located.
She then introduced three San Marino residents who were victims of home burglaries; Raymond Quan, Heidi Gabor and Joe Petrillo.
Quan showed more footage of burglars casing his home in a rented van and explained how they rang the doorbell and identified themselves as Sears employees, looking for someone named Parker, known as a “knock-knock” burglary attempt. One clip showed a hooded figure running out the front door.
“I am shaking,” said Quan. “I am shaking just telling the story. I used to think that this happened to someone else, but our house has been hit four times. We feel like we have terrorism right here on our own street, in our own home.”
He showed a still photo of a large wall that surrounds his property.
“They jumped over this as if it wasn’t even there,” he exclaimed, as the audience gasped.
Gabor, whose property is located in both San Marino and South Pasadena, told of an incident where four suspects entered her home at 10:30 p.m. that she called “kind of scary.”
“I am an exception,” she said, referencing the time of typical incident that had been mentioned earlier. “And 10:30 is when my automatic lights go off.”
Gabor indicated that her home is outfitted with “a state-of-the-art alarm system that includes motion detectors, a cellular system and panic rooms.
“None of that mattered,” she said. “The security didn’t matter.”
Gabor mentioned that police officers eventually arrived and that her loss was “relatively small in dollars.”
“But the loss to my family was great,” she continued. “I can’t go in my own back yard and I can’t leave kids at home alone. And they are in middle school and high school.”
A retired sheriff and owner of a security company, Petrillo spoke of the psychological effects of being burglarized.
“You try to understand the emotion, but you don’t understand it until you are a victim,” said Petrillo, whose home has been burglarized. “You deal with it for a long time. You can’t believe it happened to me. The zip code doesn’t make a difference. People still suffer. We have a feeling of guilt, like ‘what did I not do, that allowed this to happen?’”
Petrillo said that crime survivors often become “obsessed with home security,” and suffer from “mistrust, isolation, fear and a constant fear of a repeat burglary.”
“We need more black and whites [police cars] on the street,” Petrillo concluded.
Interim City Manager Cindy Collins urged the community to increase its home protection and “do what everyone else in this room is doing. Be aware of the surroundings in your neighborhood.”
Collins also mentioned a motion passed by the San Marino City Council in July that earmarked funding for a phasing program that pays overtime for cadets, freeing up officers to troubleshoot crime issues.
Police Chief John Incontro gave a lengthy presentation and laid out a crime reduction program that includes the placement of signs at all 66 points of entry into San Marino, touting the Neighborhood Watch program.
Incontro also mentioned a crime analysis survey, the findings of which showed that 36 of the 81 San Marino homes that have been burglarized in 2017 do not have security alarms.
“Nine more had alarms that weren’t in use,” Incontro said. “Two more homes had alarms, but the response was canceled by the homeowner.”
“A security system pays off, but you have to know how to use it,” said Incontro.
Dr. Roumani feels the evening went “very well.”
“The turnout was excellent,” he told The Tribune. “But there is much more that we can do. It was very efficient, there was no waste of time.”
Another meeting will be held in approximately six weeks, Roumani said, with a goal of including more Chinese-speaking residents.
“We are doing as much as we can do, the police are doing as much as they can do and yet things are getting worse,” said Roumani. “We are missing something. What can we do better?”