By Linda Taaffe
A tip from a police informant led to the arrest last week of a Los Altos gunman involved in a bloody, late-night holdup that has remained unsolved for five years. Los Altos Police July 1 charged Bryan Albert Cortez, 31, with two counts of attempted murder and two counts of assault with a deadly weapon for allegedly shooting a 40-year-old man in the abdomen during a robbery July, 6, 1998, at the former Lucky Food Center on Grant Road.
Police said Cortez allegedly ran into Lucky market, put a gun to a store cashier’s head and demanded she give him money from the register. He shot a bookkeeper after the employee tried to intervene, witnesses told police. Cortez fired in the direction of a second witness who tried to write down the license plate number of the getaway car while the gunman sped away with approximately $400.
In the end, Cortez had left 15 witnesses shaken, a storefront window shattered from a bullet and one man lying on his back with a gunshot wound near checkout stand No. 1. The injury left the man permanently disabled.
“It was a pretty ugly scene overall,” said Sgt. John Hughmanick, who remembers that night clearly. “At 11:35 p.m., we got a call about an armed robbery. We had a skeleton crew working. I was the watch commander that night and the second one on site. Things at the store were chaotic.”
Hughmanick said the injured employee was still conscious when police arrived.
“Our immediate concern was rendering first aid,” he added. Collecting bits and pieces of eyewitness accounts, Hughmanick alerted Sunnyvale police that the gunman could be headed their way.
Cortez escaped all checkpoints and nearly got away with attempted murder. His identity would remain unknown and the case closed until the winter of 2001.
“We exhausted all potential leads by the end of summer 1998,” Hughmanick said. “The case had turned cold. We suspended the investigation due to lack of information.”
Out of the blue, a San Jose police informant gave police a tip that reopened the case in November 2001, Hughmanick said.
“I was absolutely surprised,” he said.
Detective Joe Mamone spent the next 18 months pursuing new clues and re-examining a plethora of witnesses, which included traveling throughout the western United States to track down those who had since left the area and conducting interviews at Corcoran and Pelican Bay state prisons.
Hughmanick attributed Cortez’s arrest to “good old-fashioned detective work. It’s good to see this case come to this resolution. This type of crime doesn’t happen often in Los Altos.”
Cortez is currently serving time at Corcoran State Prison for an unrelated robbery.
He was awaiting transfer to Santa Clara to stand trial for the Los Altos crime. If convicted, he faces 61 years in jail. Hughmanick said the statute of limitations for the robbery charges expired in 2001.
