British band Sports Team were robbed at gunpoint on Tuesday in California on the first day of the US leg of their tour.
The indie group claimed they were getting coffee at a Starbucks in Vallejo, California, on Tuesday morning when they were alerted by a passerby that someone was robbing their tour van.
A cellphone video that the band posted on their Instagram account shows a person taking items out of the van, and members said the robber pulled out a gun when they tried to intervene.
In a statement on social media, the band said their equipment was still intact so they were driving on to Sacramento to perform.
“Just been robbed at gunpoint 10 minutes into the US tour. Stopped for coffee. 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. Start yelling and they pull out a gun. Police response was ‘submit an online report.’ Lost a lot of personal gear, but they didn’t get the instruments so driving on to Sacramento to play tonight,” the statement said.
“They can take our Nintendo Switches but they can never take our ability to play rock songs about motorways. In all seriousness pretty shocking how resigned everyone seemed to be to it. ‘It happens’. 9am at some petrol station Starbucks. Wild.”
The band told the BBC that they lost their passports, documents, stage equipment, and the suitcases carrying their clothes, “so we’re going to be wearing the same things for the next two weeks”.
“Somebody opened the door and was like: Does anybody have a white Sprinter van? Because you’re being robbed right now,” drummer Al Greenwood told the BBC, while describing how the robbery went down.
“So we all ran out, shouting. 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.’”
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“I really thought I was about to watch someone get shot, because it took a while for our tour manager to realize.”
The band added that they had called the police, who told them to file an online report and sent no one to the site.
The band was initially scheduled to begin their US tour in San Francisco, but was rescheduled after the band faced a delay with their travel. The band was on their way to perform at the Goldfield Trading Post in Sacramento when the robbery took place.