People v. Walters

FOURT, J.

Appellants Joe Charles Walters and Lloyd Sancho, Jr., appeal from their conviction of burglary which the jury found to be of the second degree.

[549]

The circumstances which led to their conviction are as follows : Fannie Yee and her husband owned a grocery store at 8751 S. Compton Street, Los Angeles, and on October 19, 1965, at about 7:30 p.m. Fannie Yee secured the premises, checked the burglar alarm system to be certain that all the wires were connected, and went home. The burglar alarm system is silent; if one of the wires is broken it sounds only in the company offices of U. S. Burglar Alarm and that company, in turn, notifies the owner and the police. Sometime around midnight Mrs. Yee received a call from the company registering an alarm and she thereupon returned to the store. Although none of the merchandise was disturbed or missing, she found that the wire and grille in the restroom ceiling had been broken and that the grille was hanging down. This grille, mounted flush with the ceiling, concealed a shaft two or three feet high, which went to the roof, and normally was capped by a metal cover which also had been removed.

One of the prosecution witnesses was Deputy Sheriff Ballenger who received a radio message in his patrol car at about 12:40 on the morning of October 20, 1965, and responded to the alarm immediately by proceeding to the address of the Yee market. Once there he and his partner deployed to maintain the entire building under surveillance. They observed that a car parked across the street blinked its lights twice, and they later determined that two women occupied the car which was registered to Sancho’s father. A few minutes after they arrived, Officer Ballenger observed Officer Monarrez, together with appellants and one nonappealing defendant, Boss, on the roof of the building.

Officer Monarrez testified that he climbed to the roof where he found appellants and Boss. They were near a vent, the cover of which had been removed, and beside the vent stood a large box in which he found nine pillow cases and coil of rope. The vent extended from the roof to the ceiling of the market’s restroom. Another rope was attached to a sewer pipe on the roof and this rope extended into and down the open vent to rest finally upon the grille with some loops of rope extending into the restroom below. A pair of pliers and a screwdriver also rested upon the grille which had been so bent or broken that a portion of it was hanging down into the restroom. Officer Monarrez used his baton to knock these tools from the grille to the restroom floor.