On the first day of their US tour, the British indie rock band Sports Team experienced a gunpoint robbery in the Bay Area.
Masked men ransacked the band’s tour van while they were at a Starbucks in Vallejo, near the Magazine Street exit on Interstate 80, before their first show at the Goldfield Trading Post in Sacramento, on Tuesday.
Ten minutes into the US tour, someone robbed me at gunpoint. I stopped for coffee.” A man runs in and says some guys are smashing into a van,” the band wrote on Instagram, along with a video taken inside the Starbucks. The video shows a man exiting a car armed with a gun.
He appears to wave the gun at the band’s tour manager, who flees into the Starbucks before the individuals begin removing equipment from the van.
“Someone opened the door and asked, Does anyone have a white Sprinter van? “Because you are being robbed right now,” drummer Al Greenwood told the BBC. “So we all rushed out, shouting.
Lauren, our tour manager, was slightly ahead of me, and someone else ran past us in the opposite direction, saying, “Be careful, he’s holding something.” I honestly thought I was about to watch someone get shot.”
In the video, someone can be heard telling everyone to stay inside.
The band reported that cameras, laptops, suitcases of clothes, passports, and documents were stolen. Sports Team reported on social media that Vallejo police told them to file an online report, and that bystanders appeared unconcerned about the robbery.
“In all seriousness pretty shocking how resigned everyone seemed to be to it,” the members of the band wrote. The Vallejo Police Department did not respond to a request for comment by publication time.
Sports Team has released two top-10 albums in the United Kingdom and was nominated for the prestigious Mercury Prize in 2020. The band stated that the robbery will not disrupt their U.S. tour. They are scheduled to perform at The Chapel in San Francisco on Saturday night.
