On Monday night a couple from neighboring Mar Vista was attacked at the Venice Pier. A Yo! Venice! contact at the LAPD confirmed that the attackers were known transients that stay in Venice. The attackers were arrested: one for robbery and the other for attempted robbery. We will update this when we get their booking photos.
Stay safe Venice! The LAPD is severely understaffed in Venice right now. Hopefully when City Attorney Trutanich returns to KFI Radio to answer more questions they can ask him why existent laws are not being enforced in Venice. The law is the law: it is illegal to sleep in your vehicle. We don’t need signs, we need enforcement of existing laws. There is a reason transients come to Venice: the laws are not being enforced.
From victim Robert M:
My friend Michele and I were sitting at the ocean end of the pier talking at about 10 pm or so, when a thin white male probably in his 20’s with long stringy hair and a skateboard asked for a cigarette, which we didn’t have. Then he became confrontational and started yelling that I was an old motherf**ker. He also had a friend, a black male with a white t-shirt on a bicycle circling around and acting menacing. We got up to go and he got in front of us and demanded we give him all our money or we wouldn’t be able to leave the pier because they would throw us in the ocean.
He ran up to me and slammed me on the side of the head and ear with his hand, then skated away, but came back and started up again, two or three times, brandishing the skateboard as if he was going to hit me with it. Luckily a group of about 10 guys came by and said they saw what was going on. One of them showed me his id as a Sheriff. We started walking back toward Washington Blvd, I called 911, and then all of the guy came up to us again and I lost the 911 call.
All of a sudden, the black male raced up behind us and slammed on his brakes. Next thing I knew he punched me in the jaw and rode away when the witnesses told him the cops were coming, as the Sheriff had called them too. We got to Washington Blvd. and about six men were holding the while guy down, and the police had gotten the black guy in their car, and asked us to identify him, which we did. They said that he was on parole on some burglary charge, and had a Glendale id. The paramedics were there, iced me and took a report as did the police.
