Two weeks ago, Jessie Lee Cederblom had just landed the kind of assignment photographers seek all their working lives. It was a video shoot for the revered fashion magazine Harper’s Bazaar.
The gig was to shoot a movie star on set. She needed a camera capable of filming well in low light, and she found one for sale on Craigslist. In order to be safe, she asked the man selling it to meet her in a public place. Together they agreed the parking lot outside the Bank of America near the Manhattan Mall would work well. It’s a busy place and banks have security cameras.
They planned to meet at 2 p.m. Cederblom arrived early, went into the bank and withdrew $2,000, and went back to the parking lot and waited in her car. The man called as he arrived, and, phone still in hand, Cederblom stepped out of her car and walked across the lot to greet him. She left her purse, which contained the money, on her passenger seat.
As she was introducing herself to the man from Craigslist, a black car zoomed into the lot and pulled in right next to hers, stopped for a few seconds, and then pulled back out, screeching as it left. Just as the car was leaving, Cederblom walked back to her car to grab her purse. It was gone.
“All that was left was a sandwich I’d taken a bite out of, sitting on my seat,” she recalled.
A bank video that captured the incident shows Cederblom jump out of her car and run after the black car. The man she was meeting likewise took off after the car, chasing it all the way out to Sepulveda, to no avail.
“He was such a dude, just freaking awesome,” Cederblom said. “Next thing we know I’m back in the lot. I’m in shock. ‘Oh my god, I can’t believe this just happened.’ A really nice woman named Jan came and hugged me. ‘Are you okay? Do you need to sit down?’”
She’d lost not only $2,000 in cash but all her identification — including her passport, since she’d just returned from a yoga trip to Costa Rica — and was concerned because her purse had contained both mail containing her address and a spare house key. Yet everything that happened to Cederblom afterwards restored whatever brief flicker in her faith in humanity she’d experienced at the moment of the theft.
Manhattan Beach Police Officer Tony Presgraves was on the scene immediately and helped calm her nerves. Bank staff helped her compile a checklist of things she needed to address immediately and assisted her in closing credit cards. Security helped her obtain video of the incident. Her new friend Jan stayed by her side; when she was unable to obtain a temporary ATM card due to her lack of identification, Jan gave her $100 so she could go change the lock on her door. And the man from Craigslist let her keep the camera.
“You know what?” the man told her. “Just take the camera. If you have any questions about it or need anything else, call me. We’ll work something else out later. I know you need the camera for the gig.”
Cederblom successfully shot the assignment, and in the two weeks since the theft, something else occurred that buoyed her spirits. Her network of contacts discovered what had happened, and assignments poured in — some of them prepaid, to help her raise the money to pay for the camera.
“I’ve gotten so much out of this, but especially how good people can be, and how lucky I am to have such a great community,” Cederblom said.
But she also learned a valuable lesson.
“Understand that people are watching you,” she said. “Because I didn’t realize it. People sit in parking lots, especially outside banks and shopping centers, and watch for that moment you step away and your car is not locked….How many times have I left my camera gear or purse to just cross across a lot or to go get gas or whatever?”
MBPD Sgt. Tim Zins said that parking lot theft is a particular concern during the upcoming holiday season, not necessarily in bank parking lots so much as outside shopping centers like the Manhattan Village mall.
“Theft from motor vehicles does go up around the holidays because people will go to a store and buy various items, bring them out to the car, and then go back into the mall,” Zins said. “What the suspects do is wait out in the parking lot and watch. Even if people put things in the trunk, suspects may still smash a window and use the trunk release to take things. So we always advocate people to do all your shopping and then take it home with you.”
Even then, Zins said, people need to be vigilant: sometimes thieves will follow a car home, especially when shoppers have large items, such as flat-screen television sets. One local family was burglarized last year upon returning from Best Buy, Zins said.
“It’s the same thing we tell people all the time. Just be aware of your surroundings. If you see something that doesn’t feel right, call us,” Zins said. “See something, say something.”
Zins said another concern over the holidays is package theft. He said people should track the packages that are due to arrive from online shopping, and if they cannot be home when the packages arrive, arrange for a neighbor or a friend to pick up the package as soon as it is delivered. He also said video surveillance systems, such as Ring, are extremely useful, both after a crime has occurred and as a means of prevention.
And though Cederblom’s experience with Craigslist didn’t involve suspicious activity on behalf of the man she met up with, Zins said that police have a suggestion for safely doing transactions that begin online: meet at the police station.
“Protect yourself, protect your identity, and make sure through the whole process of doing a transaction with people you’ve never met before to get as much information as possible,” he said. “Set up a good meeting place before the transaction, like the police department or the parking lot outside the station, no matter what city you are meeting in…Meet at or near a police department. That will deter any criminal from engaging in a theft or a fraud they are ready to commit.”
“If they say, ‘Oh, that is not really convenient for me,’ then say, ‘Okay, I’m not dealing with this person,’” Zins said. “The best thing is for people to use common sense in dealing with people they’ve never met before.”
