Smoke shop owner fought assailants

CLOVIS — With fresh staples in her skull and stitches in her hand, Savanah Sena said Tuesday that she had been determined to fight the armed men posing as police that broke into her home and place of business the day before.

“I was pissed off,” Sena said. “And I was afraid, and I wasn’t going to let them come into my house and injure me and my girlfriend. I wasn’t going to let them get us on our hands and knees and beg. I had to fight.”

It had only been two months since Sena started the smoke shop and art gallery, “Dirty Curry Creations,” at the east-facing end of her residence on the 100 block of Pile Street. Shortly after 3 a.m. Monday she was with her girlfriend watching Netflix in the bedroom between the storefront and garage when they suddenly heard men pounding at the door outside. She said the men claimed to be law enforcement.

“(W)e heard a loud bang, and all we could hear was people shouting, ‘This is CPD, Clovis Police Department, put your hands up,’” Sotelo said Tuesday. “I had my phone in my hands about to call the police, because I really didn’t think that they had any reason to be there. I hadn’t done anything wrong, but as I’m going to call the police, my thinking is I can’t call the police on the police.”

Sena said it was a frantic few minutes while she looked for her phone and tried to decide what to do before the intruders knocked down her side door and entered — two toward the office on the west end of the building and one toward her bedroom. She saw a young man in a hoodie and bandanna pointing a gun at the entrance to her bedroom, and commenced a chaotic grappling across multiple rooms after realizing he wasn’t a police officer.

“The second I seen a young guy walk in with a pistol and I realized he wasn’t police, I tackled him and wrestled him down,” Sena told The News. “I had him on the ground and he started pistol whipping me, I want to say about 15 times. Then a bigger guy came up and started hitting me with a shotgun, bashed in my head over 20 times. ... And while they were bashing me they kept saying, ‘Where’s the money, where’s the money?’”

The business’ money was not on scene, Sena told them, and the trio left empty-handed soon after firing gunshots in the fray, she said. They left Sena covered in her own blood in the garage beside her car.

“My whole t-shirt was soaked, it looked like a murder scene. They thought I had been shot,” Sena said. “Parents and police and every EMT and officer and nurse asked me, ‘Did you lose consciousness?’”

But she hadn’t. It was Sena’s first physical confrontation and she used no weapons of her own, she said, but after a few minutes wrestling with the pistol-wielding assailant she concluded “the little guy was more scared for his life than I was.”

The News on Tuesday afternoon revisited the scene of the confrontation along with Sena, her mother, her brother and a friend. Sena pointed out furniture that was knocked over, bullet holes in the ceiling and walls and the space where security footage caught part of the quarrel.

Sena said she never got a good look at the third intruder, who stayed largely to the office space in the back of the building. She said the second assailant, with the shotgun, was larger than the man she tackled but also around 18 or 19 years old and wearing a hoodie. Sena said she recognized the man who first approached her with a pistol but declined to identify him, noting she had spoken with police and that they advised they were generating an arrest warrant.

Clovis Poilce Capt. Roman Romero said the incident is under investigation, and CPD’s records custodian said the report was not yet releasable.

Sena said she’s still trying to reckon with how close she came to dying — “shots were fired inches away from my face” — and wants the public to be aware of the violence that occurred in downtown Clovis.

As it turned out Sena still suffered some extensive injuries, including 22 staples in her head, three stitches in her right hand “and a bunch of nasty bruises everywhere,” she said. She went to the emergency room around 4 a.m. on Monday and was there until noon, following which she stayed at home to process the events.

Sena’s girlfriend of two months — who hid inside the dryer during the altercation — is meanwhile “waking up with nightmares, screaming and gasping for air,” Sena told The News.

“She’s a small girl,” Sena added. “She climbed in (the dryer) and hid, and she told me that when she came out she thought she was going to find me dead.”

Sena believes the robbery and break-in were planned to some extent, but she doubts the assailants realized the building would be occupied. The business was closed this week while Sena recuperates, and she said she’s yet to decide when she’ll feel comfortable opening the place again.