A woman has been left shaken after her purse and car were stolen while she sat outside of San Francisco's iconic Balboa Cafe.
It only took four seconds. A man got out of a black car with tinted windows, reached over the Cafe's barrier and snatched a woman's purse as she chatted in a parklet, KPIX reported.
Moments later, the victim discovered that her car parked around the corner on Fillmore and Greenwich St. had been stolen, police said.
"Obviously she was a little bit hysterical," Sean Doolan, beverage director at Wilder, told reporter Betty Yu. "She had her belongings taken, her car taken and then you have to think about her safety as well. If they're ballsy enough to steal a car, they could probably go to her house."
Despite a recent increase in robberies and smash-and-grab thefts throughout the city, witnesses were still shocked by the ordeal. "You wouldn't think with all these people out here that something like that would be possible," a Cow Hollow employee said to the station. "I saw the commotion afterwards. It was pretty intense, everybody was kind of, you know, a little scared."
Some believe the brazen robbery was a crime of opportunity, calling the perpetrators opportunists.
"I noticed a lot of people get comfortable, especially in a dining setting, hanging out with some friends. You tend to kind of sit back to relax, which is the environment we're trying to create in a restaurant, but you still got to keep your belongings close to you," Doolan advised.
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