Flower Shop Owner Shot During Holdup

NORTH HOLLYWOOD — Robbers, who may have been annoyed that the flower shop they held up had so little money, shot the owner as he tried to escape Wednesday, sending him crashing through the shop’s front display window.

Barry Gerard, 49, suffered a flesh wound in the buttocks and will recover, authorities said.

Gerard was trying to flee from three robbers at Tommy’s Flowers in the 6000 block of Laurel Canyon Blvd. at 10:30 a.m. when he was shot, said North Hollywood robbery Det. Rick Jamieson. After he was hit, Gerard crashed through the store’s front plate-glass window, before staggering into traffic on the busy street.

“I heard the gunshots and ran outside,” said Jessica Gutierrez, who works at Golden Beeper, a store across from the flower shop. “I saw him there bending over with blood on his clothes. He was wearing shorts and a white shirt. I asked him, ‘Are you all right?’ And that’s when he collapsed.”

As his shocked wife and other employees looked on, Gerard was taken to Providence Holy Cross Medical Center in Mission Hills, where he was listed in good condition, said hospital spokeswoman Jennifer Bruce. She said he would probably be released today.

The three bandits escaped.

They had confronted Gerard, his wife and two female employees in the shop, ordering the women to lie down while Gerard gathered money from the register and emptied his pockets.

“They wanted more money and he didn’t have any,” said Jamieson. “Then they ordered him down to the ground. Mr. Gerard felt they were gonna kill him and then he ran.”

Jamieson said since the store had been open for just over an hour, the men escaped with “surely less than $100.”

Robbing a flower store wasn’t the most lucrative of ideas, the detective said. “Flower stores just don’t have that much money. They have less than 7-Eleven stores.”

The flower store, on Laurel Canyon Boulevard near Oxnard Street, is about a mile and a half from the North Hollywood branch of Bank of America that was the scene of the Feb. 28 gun battle that left two robbers dead.

With the North Hollywood police station about the same distance from the flower store, police were able to respond quickly to the shooting and nearly nabbed the robbers, authorities said.

Gerard and his wife have owned the store for about 12 years, Jamieson said. There was a robbery attempt a year ago but no one was injured.

An hour after the shooting, employees from the store were sweeping up the shattered glass while onlookers stared at a patch of dried blood where Gerard fell. “I’ve never seen anything like that,” said one local business owner who called 911 to report the shooting. “And I just don’t understand why this happened. He wasn’t bothering anyone. The guy is just trying to make a living.”