Beverly Hills Restaurant Customer Becomes Collateral Damage In Daring Daytime Robbery

Usually, a place where celebrities hang out, the Il Pastaio restaurant at Brighton Way and North Canon Drive was the ugly scene of a daytime robbery that left an innocent woman getting shot. Three men entered the post-Beverly Hills restaurant and were targeting a patron’s expensive watch.

Per witnesses, the robbers eyed a Ricard Mille watch that was valued to be worth several hundred thousand dollars, CBS LA reported. But unwilling to give it, the patron put up a fight that forced one of the robbers to pull out the gun. The firearm went off and shot a woman in the leg at the restaurant.

Drew Hancock, the woman’s boyfriend, said that he recalled the thieves and the patron fighting. He adds that the target was pushed into a barrier and tried to shield his girlfriend from potential harm.

“As we were going through there were three more shots,” said Hancock. “On the way inside, my girlfriend was hit by a ricochet in the calf.”

According to another witness, the three men jumped the man who had the watch. One of them went after the timepiece while another pointed a gun to his head. The man was reportedly a former Israeli soldier.

"[The watch owner] was fighting with them," the witness, a friend of the restaurant patron with the watch, recalled. "And while they were fighting, he pulled the gun and the gun shot one of the girls."

The identity of the woman was not revealed. She was brought to a local hospital and treated for non-life-threatening injuries. Aside from here, there was another woman who got hurt as the three men fled the scene at around2:00 p.m. on Thursday. The three men fled the scene after the shooting incident.

According to Beverly Hills Police Capt. Max Subin, the thieves were targeting the patron and his watch and not the restaurant, the LA Times reported.

The restaurant was pretty upset with the whole incident, saying that he never experience any kind of violence in the 26 years that the restaurant has been in operation.

“It’s upsetting. It’s discouraging. It’s like, what’s next?” Celestino Drago, owner of Il Pastaio said.