A Fontana man and a Los Angeles man who robbed an off-duty U.S. Secret Service agent in a Tustin neighborhood earlier this year, making off with police equipment, were convicted Monday, Oct. 28, of second-degree robbery.
An Orange County Superior Court jury also found that Jamonte Fitzgerald Johnson, 32, and E’shon Dwayne Dodson, 21, used firearms when they robbed an agent who was returning from working at a Downtown Los Angeles fundraiser attended by President Joe Biden.
The off-duty Secret Service agent was walking from his parked car in a residential neighborhood just after 9:30 p.m. on Saturday, June 15, 2024 when an armed man — later identified by prosecutors as Johnson — pointed his weapon at the agent and grabbed the agent’s laptop bag, according to an Orange County District Attorney’s Office statement.
The agent fired several gunshots, striking a third man — Bertran Claude Bell — who was sitting in a nearby SUV.
One of the three robbers dropped a gun in the midst of the robbery. That weapon — along with the agent’s stolen cell phone, radio and other belongings — apparently were left behind by the robbers during their escape and later recovered by Tustin police detectives, prosecutors said.
Authorities later learned that the robbers took Bell to a hospital in Los Angeles to be treated for his gunshot wounds.
Tustin detectives, with the help of state parole officials, tied DNA found on the gun and the agent’s stolen belongings to Johnson, prosecutors said. Johnson was arrested in the city of Riverside on July 11, 2024.
The Tustin detectives and members of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department Major Crimes Bureau Burglary-Robbery Task Force arrested Dodson in Watts on July 17 and Bell in Los Angeles on July 24.
Bell quickly pleaded guilty to a felony count of second-degree robbery and on July 29 was sentenced to six years in prison.
In a previous statement announcing criminal charges against the three men, Orange County District Attorney Todd Spitzer wrote that “No one, regardless of whether you are a Secret Service agent or an everyday resident, should have to worry about being robbed at gunpoint in the middle of a neighborhood.”
In that same statement, Tustin Police Chief Stu Greenberg noted that the men had “significant criminal histories, including multiple weapons violations.”
Johnson is a third-striker, prosecutors say, who was on federal probation for a weapons violation and parole for criminal threats at the time of his arrest for the Tustin robbery, while Bell had a previous conviction for a 2004 attempted robbery in Los Angeles.
Johnson is scheduled to return to court for sentencing on Nov. 22, while Dodson is scheduled to return on Jan. 10.
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