A U.K. rock band was just "10 minutes" into their U.S. tour on Tuesday when they were robbed at gunpoint at a California Starbucks, and they expressed shock at the calm reactions of Americans at the scene.
The band Sports Team stopped their tour van at a Starbucks in Vallejo at around 9 a.m. Tuesday to grab some coffee before driving to their first gig in Sacramento. Frontman Alex Rice, guitarists Rob Knaggs and Henry Young, bassist Oli Dewdney, keyboardist Ben Mack, drummer Al Greenwood, and their tour manager were all inside when a group of masked men started "ransacking" the van.
"Man runs in saying some guys are smashing into a van. Ran out to try to stop it and find masked guys ransacking the van," the band wrote alongside a video of the robbery.
The band members who ran outside tried to stop the robbers, but "they pull out a gun," the band wrote. "Police response was 'submit an online report'."
The band said that they had personal items stolen, but thankfully not their instruments.
"They can take our Nintendo Switches but they can never take our ability to play rock songs about motorways," the band wrote.
"In all seriousness pretty shocking how resigned everyone seemed to be to it. 'It happens'. 9am at some petrol station Starbucks. Wild," the band wrote of the reaction of Americans at the scene.
In the video, after the robbers produce a gun, Greenwood can be heard shouting "Get down, Lauren, get down" as the band members run back inside the Starbucks.
In England, most personal gun ownership is illegal, with exceptions for certain long guns used for hunting. In an interview with the BBC, band members recalled the moment they ran to confront the robbers, only to be faced with the threat of a shooting.
"Lauren, our tour manager, was slightly ahead of me, and somebody else ran past us in the opposite direction, and said, 'Careful, he's holding something,'" Greenwood told the BBC.
"I really thought I was about to watch someone get shot, because it took a while for our tour manager to realize," he said. "In the video, you can hear me screaming at her to get down."
Rice described the very different reactions of the British band members and the locals at the Starbucks.
"Obviously, if someone pulls a gun, you run for cover," Rice told the outlet. "But the thing that struck me about it was the resignation. The people around us weren't very panicked at all. It seemed like a very everyday occurrence."
-- With reporting by TMX
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