It was a typical Sunday in El Zarape.
Families enjoyed Mexican food and good vibes at the East Hollywood restaurant inside a shopping center on Melrose Avenue as CicLAvia closed the street to traffic.
But the next morning, when the first cook of the day showed up at the restaurant on Monday, a completely different scene awaited him. He called the owner, Beto Méndez, immediately.
At first, Mendez thought it might be some graffiti on the outside of the restaurant. He was wrong.
El Zarape on Melrose Avenue remains closed after a thief vandalized the Mexican restaurant.
(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)
“The moment I arrived I was shocked,” Méndez told the Times in an interview. “I saw the place completely destroyed.”
Mendez said there was $80,000 worth of damage inside.
Chairs were overturned and tables askew. A bar had been hit with a hammer and all the televisions were painted with graffiti. Spray paint covered one of the bar's surveillance cameras and apparently all of the restaurant's walls. They took a safe with $20,000.
The incident was first reported by LA Taco.
Surveillance video shows a man wearing a light-colored hoodie, dark pants and Nike sneakers waving a can of spray paint inside the bar before any damage was done. The man then sprays paint on one of the surveillance cameras, as the video shows. While Mendez couldn't see any other people in the videos, he assumed there was more than one vandal, based on the amount of damage, which included the “C14” label on the walls.
“I saw the place completely destroyed,” says Beto Méndez, owner of El Zarape.
(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)
Police told Mendez that the vandalism was related to the C-14 gang, also known as Clanton, he said. The Los Angeles Police Department did not immediately comment on the situation.
C-14 is a gang that has existed in Los Angeles for about a century and originated on Clanton Street, which was later renamed 14th Place, according to a website that documents street gangs.
The gang is active in the neighborhood, with tags on Melrose.
The group even tagged a local house of worship, Trinity Episcopal Church, by scrawling “C14” on its marquee with spray paint.
“This area is like an epicenter for a couple of gangs,” said a man who works near El Zarape, who asked to remain anonymous for security reasons. “MS-13 and C-14, as well as some other small local cliques. “There are a lot of tags all over the neighborhood.”
“If someone marked the inside of the restaurant, it's pretty serious,” he said.
For Méndez, the destruction of his restaurant couldn't come at a worse time. Just two weeks ago his ex-wife died. Méndez shared custody of her two teenage daughters with her and now has full custody of them.
“They already have that pressure and that stress of losing their mom and I haven't really told them anything about the restaurant at this point,” he said. “I'd rather keep it to myself and deal with it.”
Mendez is trying to raise money to reopen the restaurant and repair the damage through GoFundMe.
While Mendez said the restaurant has had relatively few problems in the seven years it has been open, there was an incident after the Super Bowl on Feb. 11, according to Mendez and the other person who worked at a nearby business.
That day, the two men said, after the Kansas City Chiefs defeated the San Francisco 49ers in Las Vegas, a man fired a gun into the air near El Zarape, then barricaded himself inside and police SWAT teams had to respond to arrest him.
