SAN FRANCISCO – A San Francisco business owner is in anguish after her restaurant in the Mission District was targeted by burglars two nights in a row.
Raymunda Ramirez owns El Faro, which sits at 20th and Folsom streets. She said the back-to-back burglaries are painful because she’s given so much to the community, only to fall victim to criminals.
“I feel like, I don’t know, like I want to die or something,” Ramirez said Friday. “I help everybody. If somebody don’t got money, I give it to them, even like the homeless, sometimes I come and say, ‘OK, I make coffee for you and bread.'”
Last Saturday, when Ramirez got to work, she realized someone had broken in through the front door and stolen a key from a cabinet in a back room.
She thought everything was fine until she got a call the next day.
“I got bad news for you,” she was told. “I said, ‘What?’ ‘The window is broken again.'”
That’s when someone used the stolen key to ransack another cabinet, stealing $20,000 as well as tax documents and paperwork.
Ramirez, 64, has been working at El Faro since she was in her 20s. She started out making burritos and ended up buying the restaurant two decades ago.
“All my life. All my 45 years working here,” she said.
El Faro, Spanish for lighthouse, has been a beacon and neighborhood mainstay. It lays claim as being home to the first retail burrito in the city. It was recently honored by San Francisco as a legacy restaurant, in business since 1961.
“It’s just an invasion, you know? All the way through,” said Ramirez’s daughter, Patricia Kocourek, who works alongside her mother. “Pretty bad, I would say, emotionally. I feel hurt, scared, violated.”
Kocourek had this message for the burglars. Her voice faltering, she said, “What goes through your mind when you, when you tear everything out of this office, out this restaurant, and you see pictures of kids and family?”
A GoFundMe page has been set up to help the family-run business recover.
Henry Lee is a KTVU crime reporter. E-mail Henry at [email protected] and follow him on Twitter @henrykleeKTVU and www.facebook.com/henrykleefan.
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