Golf Shop Owner Teed Off: Foils 1 Burglary Only to Be Hit Again

Theodore Changki Yoon had seen it happen again and again, 10 times in the last two weeks, three times in one 24-hour period: Thieves would break into his golf shop on Oxford Avenue in the mid-Wilshire area, usually by creeping through a fire-gutted restaurant next to the shop and boring through the thin interior wall protecting Yoon’s store.

Early Thursday morning Yoon and a friend staked out the golf shop and--armed with an unloaded shotgun and a flashlight--made a citizen’s arrest of two suspected thieves.

That helped.

For a day.

On Friday, the golf shop, which Yoon said has sustained $30,000 in losses of golf clubs, shoes and accessories during the string of break-ins, was hit again, leaving Yoon caught in a finger-pointing argument with his landlord.

Around 3 a.m. Thursday, after burglars had an after-hours shopping spree at his expense for the third time in 24 hours, Yoon, 44, and a friend, Jai Chun Chang, 38, parked Chang’s Volvo half a block from the store and watched.

‘Just Too Much’

“We decided these guys would come again and this time we will catch them. We have to protect ourselves,” said Chang, a former South Korean army lieutenant. “We decided this is just too much.”

About two hours later, two men showed up, looked into the golf store windows, then squeezed through an unhinged gate of the fence surrounding the pitch-black shell of the adjacent Oxford Cafe, deserted since a September fire.

Eventually Yoon heard his store’s all-too-familiar burglar alarm.

He and Chang drove Chang’s car to the hole in the fence and “we raided them,” Yoon said.

As had been the case in most of the burglaries, one of the suspects had entered the golf store through the easily penetrated piece of dry wall separating the shop from the restaurant.

“I clicked the hammer on the gun and yelled, ‘If you make a wrong move, you’ll be dead!’ ” said Yoon, the father of four. “So they laid down and said, ‘Don’t kill me.’ Probably they were thinking we were the police.”

About 20 minutes later, in response either to the alarm or to Yoon’s 911 call, Los Angeles police arrived in four patrol cars.

‘A Dangerous Thing’

“We were really brave to catch them ourselves, but afterwards I was thinking what a dangerous thing we did,” Yoon said. “But I was so mad, so mad.”

Eugene Foxworth, 48, and Leon Barnes, 47, of Los Angeles remain in custody on suspicion of burglary.

“The guys claimed to be scrap metal thieves,” said Detective Dan Andrews. “Not exactly your most sophisticated criminal element.”

Intruders struck again early Friday morning, Yoon said. He estimates that his losses in golf clubs, shoes and accessories add up to about $30,000.

Yoon said the gutted restaurant, shielded from street view, is unsecured, giving would-be burglars a dark, quiet, undisturbed place to break through the flimsy wall protecting his store.

“Anybody walking by could see it’s an easy target,” said Andrews, suggesting that Yoon’s problems might go away if the building “were properly secured.”

Yoon said he is frustrated by slow police response to his crime reports and by his landlord’s and insurance company’s failure to secure the adjoining wall.

One of Yoon’s landlords, in turn, said she is frustrated with him. Soo Ng, who owns the building with her husband, said a reporter’s phone call was the first she had heard of the repeated burglaries.

Insurance Estimate

Yoon “does nothing but complain” and threaten lawsuits, she said. Ng said that after the fire, which damaged Yoon’s shop in addition to destroying the restaurant, Yoon chased her contractor off the property because he wanted to make his own arrangements for the repair work. Ng said Yoon failed to submit a proper cost estimate to her insurance company and wanted to arrange building repairs through his own insurance adjuster.

For his part, Yoon may have had enough.

“I’m thinking of closing entirely,” he said.