Bail was set at $50,000 for a 41-year-old San Bernardino man on Tuesday, May 6 after breaking into a hotel room and then later assaulting the hotel guests who had called the police on him.
Officers of the Santa Monica Police Department were called out to a hotel in the 100 block of Broadway, at 3:45 am on this day regarding an assault in progress.
Upon arrival the officers discovered a suspect on the second floor and detained him while two other officers spoke with victims who were situated on the third floor.
The officers learned that this suspect had broken into a storage room in the hotel and stolen a spare set of keys for each of the hotel’s rooms.
The suspect had then allegedly entered a room on the second floor, and had left some property in that room.
The officers discovered that the suspect had later used one of the keys to enter the room where the victim and his girlfriend were sleeping.
This had awoken the victim and his girlfriend and when they confronted the suspect, the suspect had told them that he was in fact part of the domestic staff at the hotel.
The suspect stalled for a short time, and then left the room.
The victim and his girlfriend then saw the suspect trying other doors in the hotel, so they called the hotel manager and he called the police.
A short time later, the victim and his girlfriend heard their room door being unlocked again.
The victim went to the door to confront the suspect again, and then followed the suspect down the hallway when the suspect tried to walk away.
The suspect surprised the victim by turning around suddenly and punching the victim in the face.
The victim was knocked out by the punch and fell to the ground.
The suspect then stomped on the victim’s head at least four times.
When the victim’s girlfriend saw this, she screamed at the suspect to stop and told him she was calling the police.
The suspect then approached the victim’s girlfriend and knocked the phone out of her hand.
After a brief struggle, the suspect grabbed the phone away from the female victim and fled, but was detained by the responding officers referenced at the start of this report.
This San Bernardino man was arrested and charged with residential burglary, aggravated assault, robbery, preventing a witness/victim from calling 911, as well as a probation violation.
Editor’s Note: These reports are part of a regular police coverage series entitled “Alert Police Blotter” (APB), which injects some minor editorial into certain police activities in Santa Monica. Not all of The Mirror’s coverage of incidents involving police are portrayed in this manner. More serious crimes and police-related activities are regularly reported without editorial in the pages of the Santa Monica Mirror and its website, smmirror.com.
