Rising Oakland home invasions rob victims of sense of security

Police officers search an Oakland neighborhood for a suspect in a home invasion and armed robbery, Monday, Dec. 10, 2012. Police officers search an Oakland neighborhood for a suspect in a home invasion and armed robbery, Monday, Dec. 10, 2012. Photo: Lacy Atkins, The Chronicle Photo: Lacy Atkins, The Chronicle Image 1 of / 4 Caption Close Rising Oakland home invasions rob victims of sense of security 1 / 4 Back to Gallery

Beverley Concannon was in the bathroom of her home in Oakland’s Dimond neighborhood when she heard two loud bangs. She realized someone was kicking in her front door.

She called police, then walked into the hall and came face-to-face with a stranger. Within moments, she felt a piercing blow to her left shoulder. She had been shot by one of four young men who then fled with her laptop, driving away in a Toyota Camry that had been stolen from an Oakland hills home three days earlier.

It was one of 191 home-invasion robberies in 2014 in Oakland, the most in at least a decade.

The spike in home invasions, a crime so traumatizing that some victims pack up and move, contributes to Oakland’s reputation as a criminal haven even as the city makes dramatic strides in reducing robberies overall. Oakland had the nation’s highest robbery rate in both 2012 and 2013, but stickups plunged 31 percent last year. Residential burglaries — break-ins committed when residents aren’t home — dropped 28 percent.

But Oakland police haven’t been able to take down the most brazen robbers who, when they target a home, either don’t care if someone is home or prefer it that way.

“They’re willing to take a risk. They’re conducting surveillance, they’re watching the home, they’re going in,” said police Capt. Rick Orozco, who oversees the neighborhood where Concannon was shot Jan. 28 and responded to the scene. “They’re hoping for bigger gains inside the home. They have no fear.”

One investigator

Lt. Steve Walker, who oversees robbery probes for Oakland police, estimated that roughly 20 percent of the home invasions in 2014 resulted in arrests, roughly the same figure as for robberies overall. The city has eight investigators to handle thousands of robberies; one of the eight is specifically assigned to home invasions.

It’s a crime that is notoriously challenging to solve, Walker said, partly because victims are often so terrified that they don’t get a good look at the assailants.

The intruders tend to leave behind little traceable evidence, he said. “A lot of times, whatever they touch, they take,” Walker said.

Two men and two teenage brothers who allegedly broke into Concannon’s home were later arrested and are suspected of committing a string of such invasions in the East Bay over a two-week period, authorities say. They have ties to East Oakland and allegedly targeted wealthier neighborhoods in the Berkeley and Oakland hills and in Piedmont.

In a recent interview, Concannon, 82, said she believed her attackers had no idea she was inside until they saw her.

“I believe it was total shock,” she said.

Yet instead of leaving, the men shot her.

Concannon, a retired instructor who taught French and Spanish at a Marin County high school, spoke philosophically of the suspects, calling them “victims of a society that has gone astray and has been for a long time. They are victims of history, and they have also been cooped up in a ghetto, and I think the basic problem is one of de facto segregation.”

Targeting pot growers

Orozco said a large number of home invasions involve not random victims like Concannon but specific targets such as marijuana growers. Oakland is a haven for urban pot growers, which could partly account for why home invasions have spiked even as they have declined in other cities, including San Francisco.

“As we get these illegal weed grows, we start seeing an increase in residential robberies as well,” Orozco said. “You’re running the risk. You’re in a trade that typically has violence, and so by opening yourself up to weed grows, there’s consequences behind that, unfortunately.”

Authorities describe two basic types of home thieves. One type might knock on a front door, then sneak in through a back or side door if no one’s home and quickly leave with property. But the other type typically works in groups or “crews,” carries guns or other weapons, and breaks open the front door.

“The guys who are going to kick your door and point a gun in your face and say, 'Where’s all your cash and jewelry?’ — that’s a smaller percentage of these guys who are doing these home invasions, but those guys are the really scary ones,” said Joe Goethals, an Alameda County deputy district attorney.

“The crew that brings a gun with them,” he said, “they’re preparing themselves for whatever is on the other side of that door, whether somebody’s there or not.”

String of crimes

Goethals handled the preliminary hearing against Shaquez Willard, 19, and Patrice Davis, 19, who were charged in connection with the attack on Concannon and other alleged crimes.

On the same day that Concannon was shot, authorities said, Willard fled from police in Piedmont, where he had been casing homes for potential burglaries, and discarded a loaded 9mm pistol that had been stolen two years earlier in another home-invasion robbery.

Four days before the Piedmont and Oakland incidents, the same group kicked down the door of a home on Charing Cross Road in the Berkeley hills, even after hearing water running inside, according to court testimony. They were later scared off.

The day after that, they waited for a couple to leave their Oakland hills home and kicked in a door to their garage to steal their Camry — the car they were using when they allegedly attacked Concannon.

The owner of the Camry, who didn’t want his named used out of safety concerns, counts himself as lucky because “we weren’t home when it happened.”

“Home-invasion robberies, they’re happening,” he said. “They’re a concern to all of us in our neighborhood.”

Willard has pleaded not guilty and is awaiting trial. Davis has been convicted in connection with the series of incidents and is awaiting a preliminary hearing on attempted murder, burglary and robbery charges in another home invasion — a 2013 incident in Piedmont in which one of several assailants fired a shot toward a homeowner.

Speaking generally, Willard’s attorney William Du Bois said many burglars are “not put off by the idea that someone might be home. They don’t choose the victims by virtue of their presence. They choose the residences, and the victims are there by unfortunate coincidence, which they ignore.”

2013 bloodshed

Du Bois is also representing one of three men awaiting sentencing in an Oakland double slaying in 2013 that prosecutors said was the result of a home invasion. The haul, according to police: flat-screen TVs and a Giants bobblehead.

Although such intrusions can be terrifying, the motive is still financial.

Alexander Smith, a supervisory security guard with Security Code 3, which provides private patrols in Oakland, said most residential robbers would “take efforts not to kill or hurt anyone seriously, because that’s just going to make more heat for themselves. Not because they care about people — I’m sure they don’t — (but) they don’t need the heat.”

Still frightened

Almost a year after being shot, Concannon hasn’t moved from her home, but her left arm and shoulder are still numb and she is scared by loud noises. She has replaced her front door with a stronger one and added other security measures.

She said arresting robbers was important in the short term, but that the real solutions were societal.

“People have these kinds of automatic responses to (how to reduce crime), but it takes a lot of deep thought and action on the part of everybody — and I don’t know what that is,” she said. “What’s happening is not good.”

Henry K. Lee is a San

Francisco Chronicle staff writer. E-mail: hlee@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @henryklee