An employee was tied up and pistol-whipped by a group of robbers while he slept in a bed at a Fontana pallet yard Monday morning, with the frightening encounter caught on surveillance video according to the San Bernardino County Sheriff's Department.
The victim of the assault was able to provide detailed descriptions of the suspects with the assistance of surveillance video at Garcia's Woodworks Yard on the 8600 block of Beech Avenue in Fontana, where the robbery and assault occurred.
The worker told NBC4 that he got into a scuffle with the intruders, who broke his finger and taped his mouth shut while tying him up. Then, he says, they struck him in the head with a gun and knocked him out.
The worker told NBC4 that he thought the robbers were going to kill him.
Surveillance video shows the robbers stole two semitrailers loaded with pallets and used one of the trucks to ram the gate open before leaving.
The injured employee eventually regained consciousness, freed himself and called the owner of the business.
Soon after, investigators located a pallet yard in Riverside County, where the SBSD described "suspicious subjects" unloading pallets from semitrailers in darkness.
San Bernardino Sheriff's deputies travelled to Riverside County and located five subjects, who allegedly attempted to flee, and captured all five suspects without further incident.
The SBSD said that 1,400 stolen pallets and a stolen semitrailer were recovered from the five suspects.
The San Bernardino County Sheriff's Department identified the suspects as 44-year-old Dolores Garcia of Bloomington, 37-year-old Nicolas Mora of Fontana, 24-year-old Anthony Lopez of Fontana, 51-year-old Jesse Jimenez of Fontana and 37-year-old Carlos Ocampo of Fontana.
As a note, the initial robbery and assault only involved three men per SBSD.
