U.S. Armor Corp. employees know that lives depend on every product they turn out.
The Cerritos company makes ballistic armor vests for law enforcement and emergency workers at more than 200 agencies, including the Los Angeles Police Department and the sheriff’s departments of L.A. and Orange counties.
But police can be a tough crowd. Phoenix patrol officer Jan Moore, for one, was skeptical when she received her custom-made vest.
“I often wondered how it could possibly save me,” she said. “It was so thin and light.”
She found out in June 2008 when an assailant shot her in the chest at close range with a .357-caliber handgun. The vest stopped the bullet and distributed the force of the impact.
The vest saved my life,
she said. “I was really glad I was wearing it”.
Survival stories like that never get old for the husband-and-wife team who run U.S. Armor: Stephen E. Armellino, 57, is president, and Jana M. Armellino, 47, is chief operating officer.
“I get phone calls from a user of one of our products or their spouse, thanking us for saving them from serious injury or maybe death,” Stephen Armellino said. “That lets us know how important our products are to people.”
Inside U.S. Armor’s 25,000-square-foot factory, the assembly lines look similar to those that make expensive designer jeans. They even use some of the same cutting and sewing equipment. Not the same materials, though — U.S. Armor vests employ a variety of ballistic layers including DuPont’s Kevlar aramid fiber, introduced in the early 1970s, and some of the latest, such as Spectra and Gold Flex byHoneywell International Inc., which are polyethylene based.
“There are a lot of different ballistic materials,” Armellino said. “We will use a few layers of this style and a few layers of that style. Different fibers work differently. We keep them as light and as flexible and as comfortable as we can.”
The company’s biggest endorsement came from theU.S. Department of Homeland Security in December 2006, when the agency signed a five-year, $50-million deal with U.S. Armor that was touted as “the largest non-military concealable body armor contract ever awarded in this country.”
Under the contract, U.S. Armor would fill the primary armor needs of 10 federal forces, including the Coast Guard, Border Patrol, Federal Air Marshals and Secret Service.
Lance Ishmael, armor and weapons instructor for the Orange County Sheriff’s Department, wasn’t surprised.
“Our agency has used them for about 14 years,” he said. “We test them ballistically even after their time in the field, when they should be destroyed. We’ve shot them with various types of firearms, and I have yet to have one fail.”
Armellino followed in the footsteps of his father, Richard, a pioneer in the field of body armor. In 1969 the elder Armellino founded a company called American Body Armor & Equipment on Long Island, N.Y.
