Such measures made little difference to shoppers who periodically surveyed their surroundings on Tuesday. Several acknowledged that Stanford Shopping Center had become a target.
“Just look at all these stores,” Fran Hall, a visitor from New Hampshire, said from a courtyard bench, pointing to a phalanx of designer retailers that included Zegna, Louis Vuitton and Sephora, where a security guard stood in the doorway. “You could see why someone would come” to shoplift, she said.
Anna Foster, a tourist from the United Kingdom who witnessed the crime scene on Monday evening, said she was in a car tooling down Sand Hill Road when she saw the swarm of police cars at El Camino Real. Pulling up to the police roadblock, Foster watched an officer jump out of his cruiser and run toward the shopping mall with a rifle.
The dramatic episode didn’t stop Foster and her family from heading to the shopping center on Tuesday, though they appeared shaken.
“I don’t feel safe anywhere,” Foster said.
Shards of glass littered the ground beneath a boarded-up window at Fleming’s Prime Steakhouse, where a gunman — who police identified as Ginsberg — fired at least two rounds into the restaurant at 4:25 p.m. on Monday, before fleeing in a black Chevrolet Camaro.
On Tuesday morning the restaurant was closed, with blinds drawn over the windows and umbrellas folded at its al fresco dining tables. The shooting left no one injured, though a few mallgoers tweeted that they had to evacuate, and others said they were temporarily stranded in nearby shops.
Representatives from Simon Property Group, the company that operates Stanford Shopping Center, did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
Monday’s burst of gunfire capped off a year of high-profile capers and raw nerves at the shopping center. This month, five shoplifters struck a Burberry store at the mall and swiped several handbags, threatening to hurt employees and pushing a security guard, though no one reported any injuries. Police had arrested four suspects in July for allegedly ransacking a Lululemon store, where officers said they caught the thieves carrying 100 pairs of leggings, worth $12,000.
Other, more disturbing instances include a shooting in the shopping center parking lot in February, which left a man wounded in his foot and hand, and an armed robbery in January in which a teenager allegedly stole purses from restaurant-goers.
These crimes mirrored the issues welling up in Union Square, where Mayor London Breed and other city leaders stood before TV cameras last week, promising to clamp down on organized retail theft, and begging shoppers to return. Breed and other politicians have struggled to reinvigorate business corridors that wilted during the pandemic, and viral videos of shoplifters haven’t helped.
Merchants who face comparable challenges at Stanford Shopping Center showed varying emotions, from trying to write off the shooting as an unfortunate feature of modern life, to blaming city and state officials for failing to stop crime.
“There’s definitely a lack of enforcement; it’s the culture of government in California,” said Daren Bryant, a worker at Therabody, which sells products to help athletes recover from injuries. The shop recently opened across the parking lot from Fleming’s, and on Tuesday morning Bryant and his co-workers looked unflappable as they prepared for a Black Friday sale.
Still, Bryant voiced concern that apathy at the state level had trickled down to local law enforcement.
Kim Parkes, a superintendent overseeing a construction project at the mall, said he was “a bit surprised” to learn of the shooting that morning, though he dismissed it as a one-off act, rather than a foreshadowing of more chaos and disorder. Gesturing as a Palo Alto police officer walked by, Parkes said he felt the mall had ample security.
Suong Tran, a traveler from Orange County who was sitting with family outside Blue Bottle Coffee, said thoughts of grab-and-go heists crossed her mind as she passed a nearby jewelry store, but she tried to brush them off.
“I’m very vigilant when I’m out, but I’ve let my guard down here,” Tran said. “Just now I was thinking about how this is a very safe area.”
Rachel Swan is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: rswan@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @rachelswan
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