George Martinez and Maria Lopez
VENTURA — In the early afternoon of January 11th, Ventura Police Department’s Communication Center was notified of a grocery store theft at the city’s WinCo Foods facility, a 24-hour employee-owned discount market crowded with shoppers at the time of the incident, that had escalated into a bona fide armed robbery.
According to the report filed by the VPD Watch Commander, officers responded quickly to the scene but found that the alleged suspects had fled the scene. The ensuing investigation indicated that two perpetrators “selected several items in the store and concealed them in a bag” and then departed the premises without any attempt to pay for the goods.
At that time, the store’s Loss Prevention Officer contacted the two individuals, later identified as Maria Lopez, 37, and George Martinez, 47, both residents of Oxnard.
Neither Lopez nor Martinez gave any indication of their willingness to comply with the store’s representative suggestion that they either pay for the merchandise or return them to the store.
Instead, Martinez “brandished a taser” at the Loss Prevention Officer and fired it at him, whereupon both suspects “fled on foot away from the scene with the stolen property.”
But karma—as well as good video surveillance imagery and law enforcement’s social media requests for public help—has a way of catching up with people, and four days later the Oxnard Police Department received an anonymous tip via telephone indicating that Lopez and Martinez had been spotted at Oxnard’s Mandalay County Park. Acting on that information, officers responded to the park and made contact with the pair.
Following a brief investigation and identification of them, Lopez and Martinez were taken into custody and transported to Ventura County Jail, where they were booked on charges of conspiracy and armed robbery.
Photo: courtesy Ventura Police Department
