Violent, armed looters overrun Santa Monica Music Center: 'They took everything from us, and no one stopped them'

For almost five decades, Santa Monica Music Center was an oasis of arts and education that gave all walks of life the opportunity to bond over melodies.

But in the riots that reached Santa Monica on Sunday, almost everything inside was damaged or pilfered as the distraught owners looked on, and those who tried to defend the building had guns and other weapons pulled on them with no law enforcement to be found.

"It was just a horror movie," Lana Negrete, 40, who now co-owns the center with her father Chico and runs the business with her husband. "They took everything from us, and no one stopped them. It was so violating."

Nestled on 19th Street and Santa Monica Boulevard, the center – started in 1972 by Cuban-Spanish brothers Paul "Chico" and Victor Fernandez – rented out musical instruments at low costs to local schools and anyone looking to learn who couldn't afford to buy their own. Its upstairs music school brought together a vast spectrum of the southern California community from the low income and the struggling, to the young and the old, and to those who wanted to learn anything from Beethoven to Beyonce to the Beetles and beyond.

But its future is now uncertain.

The calamity unfolded in broad daylight just after 4 p.m. on Sunday afternoon. Negrete and her husband were at the beach with their two daughters, 10 and 12, when they saw that one of the girls' bike tires had been slashed.

That was something of an omen of what was soon to come as the family made their way east toward their beloved business.

"We heard windows being smashed. I saw a woman with snakeskin pants with her face pressed up against the glass of our store, and then she called a group over," Negrete recalled, bringing to life every elastic second of her ordeal. "I saw them trying to get in, and I just started screaming and honking the horn."

A neighboring business owner of a small pharmacy advised them to stand guard outside as a deterrent – he was already donning an AR-15 and bulletproof vest – and Negrete called a group of friends who immediately came to the scene.

"We went in and started hiding what instruments we could, we moved a refrigerator to barricade the door, and we wrote 'minority-owned' across the front," she said. "But soon, it started with groups of five. Then groups of 10 – most with backpacks on skateboards and machetes and hammers in their hands started coming toward the center."

A few minutes later, when Negrete dared look again, from every direction, there were hundreds of people barreling toward them in a scene she depicted as "pandemonium." There were cars speeding up to the center – including brand new luxury Mercedes SUVs and Infiniti vehicles – with trunks popping open ready to be filled with loot, and while it was mostly young men, every ethnicity and age assaulted the building before her eyes.

"I saw 16-year-old girls in designer clothes stealing, I saw a woman with a small child in the back drive up and push her 13-year-old son, who looked nervous, out of the car to go in and steal," Negrete said. "There were just so many groups of people there who had nothing to do with the Geor... (Read more)

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