Three men with power tools. A hundred cars jammed into an intersection. Forty people pouring through a smashed window. Two minutes of work. Nearly $30,000 gone. And when the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department finally pushed through the crowd, the thieves had already melted back into the circus.
That is what Saturday morning looked like in Bellflower.
Around 3:30 a.m. on August 15, deputies from the Lakewood Station got a call that 20 to 30 people were breaking into a business near Bellflower and Somerset boulevards. When they arrived, they found what California now treats like weather. A street takeover. One hundred to 150 vehicles blocking the roadway. Donuts. Spectators. Chaos used as camouflage.
The target was A-Z Market, a family liquor store the Abdullatif family has spent 11 years building. Surveillance video shows three unidentified suspects using power tools to shatter the front window and cut the lock on the security gate. Then 30 to 40 more rushed in. Masks on. Cameras ripped down. Counters smashed. Beer, wine, liquor, tobacco, and cash swept off the shelves. Two minutes later they walked out and disappeared into the crowd.
Deputies issued citations for the takeover. They made no arrests for the burglary.
A Family Watched Its Livelihood Get Torn Apart
Steven Abdullatif was not even at the store. He watched it happen from home on the cameras.
“It’s crazy,” he told NBC Los Angeles. “I’ve never seen something like that before. I usually see it on the media, but I never expected it to happen to me.”
His brother Nathan put the human cost in plainer language.
“We worked so hard to establish this business over 11 years, and for it to be done just 10 minutes after people coming in here, taking everything that we have, it’s just very sad, and it’s hard to get over.”
Steven later told CBS he was in “total shock” as someone used an electric saw on his store. Then the swarm came. They jumped the counter. They broke refrigerator doors. They wrecked the lottery machine and the register. Deputies put the damage and stolen inventory near $30,000. The family has already paid out of pocket to replace the front glass and is asking the community to help with the rest.
This is not a corporation writing off a loss. This is a family that served a neighborhood and got treated like an ATM with a lock worth cutting.
This Is a Pattern, Not a Night Out
The sheriff’s office can recite the talking points. Officials said they remain “committed to protecting our community” and warned that illegal street takeovers “are not harmless entertainment.” They attract reckless driving, illegal firearms, and other crime. True enough. The problem is that the same speech keeps getting recycled while the same playbook keeps working.
The weekend before Bellflower, AutoZone stores in East Los Angeles and South Los Angeles were looted after similar takeovers. The East LA shop on Atlantic Boulevard was hit twice in two days. Sheriff’s detectives released photos of 27 people they want identified from that ransacking. A Downey AutoZone and a Spirit Halloween were hit the same stretch. Another AutoZone near Century and Central was hit days later.
This has been going on for years. AutoZones. Liquor stores. Beauty shops. 7-Elevens. The crowd blocks the intersection. A smaller crew peels off with tools. The loot is carried out in minutes. Everyone blends back into the spectacle. Deputies fight through a wall of cars and find wreckage.
The New York Post reported in July that LAPD had already made 249 arrests at takeovers this year and was shifting tactics because the events keep injuring people and terrorizing neighborhoods. County officials have raised fines to $1,000 and like to boast that takeover numbers are down on paper. Fine. Then explain why a family store in Bellflower still got carved open like a can.
California even has a looting statute, Penal Code 463, that treats theft during chaos as something more serious. It only applies during a declared emergency. A street takeover does not count. So a mob that uses 150 cars as cover faces the same basic burglary and theft charges as a lone thief on a Tuesday afternoon. The chaos that made the crime possible carries no extra weight. That is not a loophole. That is a policy choice.
Because sentence against an evil work is not executed speedily, therefore the heart of the sons of men is fully set in them to do evil. Ecclesiastes 8:11 said it long before social media turned intersection crime into content.
Lawlessness Loves a Crowd
Street takeovers are sold as car culture. They are not. They are a mobile riot with a soundtrack. Organized on phones. Filmed for clout. Protected by numbers. When a man can saw through a security gate in public and then vanish into 150 vehicles, the state has already told him what it will and will not do.
Citations are not justice. Photo arrays of 27 suspects are not justice if the same crews hit again the next weekend. A sheriff’s news release is not a substitute for arrests, prosecutions, and prison. Small businesses cannot survive a California that treats smash-and-grab as a public nuisance instead of a violent insult to property, order, and the people who work for a living.
The Abdullatifs did the hard thing. They built a store. They stayed open. They served their neighbors. A mob repaid them with a saw, a smashed gate, and two minutes of plunder. If officials want to prove those takeovers are not “harmless entertainment,” they can start by treating the people who use them as cover like the thieves they are.
Bypass Big Tech Censors
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
