Bottle Battle : Beverage Container Proves a Cool Way to Fend Off Gunman

Given his choice of weapons, Charles Wesley would rather arm himself with a pistol than a bottle of Snapple every time.

But Sunday night, when he hurled the bottle at a man with a gun, the restaurant manager in Calabasas found that a well-aimed lemon-flavored iced tea can do the job quite nicely.

From about 15 feet away, Wesley hit the masked man, who was dressed in black like a ninja, in the face with the bottle. That gave Wesley enough time to flee, dodging bullets on the way, said Lt. Michael Moore of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department.

“I guess I beat him to the draw,” said Wesley, a soft-spoken Brooklyn native whose wife is five months pregnant.

The incident was actually Wesley’s second crime-fighting adventure. In 1982, he tackled a man who had robbed a woman at knifepoint outside a Panorama City supermarket, for which he was honored by the mayor, the police chief and the Board of Supervisors.

Monday’s incident started about 12:15 a.m. when Wesley, 31, was locking up at the Red Robin restaurant on Calabasas Road and heading home, Moore said. As Wesley walked to his car, he saw a man jump into shrubbery at the edge of the parking lot.

Wesley said he thought he had stumbled upon someone relieving himself. He tried to startle the man and yelled at him to come out.

“This guy jumps out in this all black, ninja-type outfit, wearing a ski mask and has this gun pointed at me,” Wesley said. “I thought he was going to kill me.”

The man, who was kneeling in a firing position, told Wesley to freeze, authorities said.

Instead, Wesley reached into a pocket for the iced tea he had planned to drink on the way home and threw it at the man. “I was very lucky to hit him,” he said.

Wesley said he ran, taking cover first behind a wall and then running in a zigzag to avoid the bullets the man was firing at him.

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In all, the man shot and missed three times before he escaped by driving away in a black Cadillac or Monte Carlo, authorities said.

“We couldn’t recommend this type of thing,” Moore said of the bottle-throwing. “But in this case, it did work . . . and no one got hurt.”

When Wesley detained the armed robber 12 years ago, he won citations and commendations from some of the city’s most powerful people. This time, all he got was a couple of days off.

Still, he believes he did the right thing.

“I thought he was going to rob me, then kill me,” he said. “My wife’s birthday is in two days and I didn’t want to miss it.”