APA Homes Hit in String of Heists
January 23, 2004
At least three Asian Pacific American households in Daly City were broken into and robbed of thousands of dollars worth of valuable artifacts, jewelry and coins on Jan. 12, according to Daly City police reports. The home invasions have a striking resemblance to a spree of home invasions that plagued the county last year.Perhaps the worst hit in this latest wave was the Southgate Avenue home of brother and sister Alice and Dennis Wong and Alice’s fiancé Nathaniel Peter Joseph. The Wongs lost 30 to 40 pieces of antique Chinese jewelry valued at more than $60,000, a collection of 17th-century Chinese coins worth more than $50,000 and a collection of antique Western fountain pens worth more than $10,000.
Alice Wong discovered the robbery, she said in an interview at her home, when she and Joseph retuned from shopping around 3:15 p.m. The front door was ajar and upon entering the home, they found drawers open, a mattress flipped over, attaché cases rifled through and a safe lying open on the floor. The thieves apparently broke in through the back door, shattering the door jam.
“The safe was in the hallway,” Alice Wong said. “Everything was scattered. I realized we’d just been robbed. We were just discussing, before the robbery, that we should put it in a safe deposit box in the bank.”
They were not alone. A pair of Japanese American residents on Westbrook Avenue were robbed of more than $10,000 in Hawaiian and Asian jewelry, $4,500 worth of Japanese yen, 50 Eisenhower silver dollars and other items. A Chinese American family on Lake Vista Drive was robbed of $3,100 in jewelry and $600 cash. The Wongs said police told them of a fourth robbery.
The modus operandi in the Daly City robberies — hitting only APA homes during daylight hours, prying open a back window or sliding glass door to gain access and stealing valuables such as jewelry, cash, art and silver — is similar to a spree of home invasions that dogged communities in San Bruno, Millbrae and Burlingame throughout 2002-2003. At that time, local police said the crimes were being committed by members of a notorious East Bay Vietnamese gang, the Viet-Thugs.
Daly City police told the Wongs that this seemed to be an “Asian thing,” said Joseph, who was inclined to agree. Several valuable electronics items were left alone, as was a large pile of Christmas presents.
“To me, it appeared they were pretty selective with what they were taking,” said Dennis Wong.
Alice and Dennis Wong are comfortable with banks, having grown up in America, but say immigrants of their parents’ generation were inclined to keep valuables at home.
For the Wongs, keeping these items at home was not out of a mistrust of banking. Rather, it was an oversight in the long process of putting their family’s life back together. Alice and Dennis Wong are 27 and 25 years old, respectively. In 2001, their parents died within months of each other, their mother from an asthma attack, their father from colon cancer. Alice Wong and Joseph moved back into their parents’ house from their own home in Woodside, and Dennis Wong moved back home from Japan so they could care for their 19 -year-old sister, Nancy.
They were never planning to sell the family valuables, and didn’t regard them as investments. Instead, they looked at them as mementoes of their beloved parents and grandparents. Their grandfather liked to collect rare artifacts and coins, Alice said.
“The diameter of these coins was quite large, larger than U.S. coins,” she said. “It had a picture of a Chinese emperor, and Chinese writing on the top. On the back, it had a sailboat. There was another one with the same emperor and it had a dragon on the back.”
The jewelry pieces, she added, were 24-karat gold necklaces, rings and other items given to her parents by their mothers and fathers.
The fear has been almost as bad as the loss, they said. Police informed them that having cased the house, a return break-in is likely. And the thieves worked hard to break in, shattering a back window and then breaking down three dead-bolted doors that stood between the basement and the upper floors of the house.
“Our entire faith is with the Daly City Police Department to catch these guys, and I’m confident they will do their jobs,” said Alice Wong.
The Daly City police spokesperson could not be reached by press time.
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