Man shot during laptop robbery at North Oakland bus stop
OAKLAND, Calif. - An Oakland man was shot Friday night while being robbed of his laptop. The victim is recovering from non life-threatening injuries.
The theft happened in North Oakland in a neighborhood called Santa Fe.
It was just before 9:30 p.m. Friday when people in the area heard a gunshot.
“We heard the loud shot, you know, so I'm thinking it's probably firecrackers, then all of a sudden, they said, somebody got shot,” said Moe, manager at Stanford Liquors.
“Heard a lot screaming, I don't want to die like this, somebody help me. It wasn't worth it. Call 911,” said Brian Veivia.
The victim was at a bus stop where Adeline Street and Stanford Avenue converge.
Brian Veivia, a former paramedic, lives nearby and grabbed his emergency kit to help the victim.
“The guy was on the ground screaming that he had been shot and kind of holding his right hip. There was no blood or anything on the ground, but he was obviously in a lot of pain,” said Veivia.
“I'm like what happened, he was like, oh they tried to take my laptop,” said Moe.
The victim lives nearby in this building.
People here say the unidentified man -- said to be in his 20's -- is recovering from a wound in the hip.
Councilman Dan Kalb represents the district where the crime happened.
He says he's pushing for increased police patrols in the area, and working to get the department to host more police academies to speed up the pace of hiring.
“We have a vacancy rate in our department in OPD that is more than twice as much as it should be and I want to keep that vacancy rate down as much as possible. The only way to fill vacancies is to have regular police acadamey’s," said Oakland Council member Dan Kalb.
On New Year’s Eve, a man in Oakland’s Montclair district was killed while pursuing thieves accused of stealing his laptop from a coffee shop.
Robberies have been on the rise in some areas of Oakland in recent months, and in neighborhoods like where the man was shot for his laptop, it's putting some people on edge.
“It's crazy and it's really sad. It makes us feel unsafe in our neighborhood,” said Veivia.
“OPD is very aware of the problem and they are trying to react appropriately to be more visible, to have operations, to do more investigations to catch these people, but we can't be everywhere 100 percent of the time,” said Kalb.
Because of attrition and retirements the department is losing officers faster than expected, so right now the vacancy rate of 8%, according to Kalb, compared to 3.5%, which is considered normal.