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Oakland: TV camerawoman robbed

OAKLAND — A veteran journalist was robbed of her camera while working Friday, the same week that armed thieves targeted a television cameraman in Alameda and stole his camera.

Raquel Maria Dillon, a multi-media journalist with NBC Bay Area, was at 35th and Penniman avenues — where an AC Transit bus struck and killed a 2-year-old boy on Tuesday afternoon — when the robber pulled the camera from her hands.

Dillon had just finished covering a story and was walking back to her car when the robber struck, according to a spokeswoman for NBC Bay Area.

“Fortunately, she was not hurt,” the spokeswoman said. “Raquel is OK.”

The robbery comes in the wake of two men targeting a field manager with KGO-TV on Monday afternoon in the 300 block of Westline Drive in Alameda and stealing his camera.

One of the thieves displayed a handgun before they stole the camera and some of the station employee’s personal property, police said.

The victim, who was not hurt, could not provide a detailed description of the robbers, saying both males were between 20 and 30 years old and wearing sweatshirts. They fled the scene in a white van, police said.

A description of the robber who targeted Dillon, whose background includes work for the Associated Press, KGO, and KQED radio, in Oakland was not immediately available.

The robberies in Oakland and Alameda are the latest in a string of robberies of TV news crews, newspaper photographers, and private film crews in the Bay Area over the past several years.

Among the incidents was the robbery of a KGO-TV news crew in August 2013 as they filmed a segment in West Oakland accompanied by a security guard and the robbery of a crew from a private film company in November 2015 near the Berkeley Marina in Berkeley.

The robberies have prompted some news organizations and film companies to hire security guards to shadow employees while they are on assignment.