A jewelry store in Encino on Sunday became the latest to be targeted by burglars using a blowtorch to gain access to its safes.
Surveillance video from Afghan Lapis Jewelry on the 17600 block of Ventura Boulevard shows four burglars crawling on the floor after breaking into the business during the early morning hours.
KTLA reporter Angeli Kakade was at the store Wednesday morning. She could still smell the smoke from inside the ransacked shop, where items were overturned and a blowtorch was used to open two safes.
The suspects are believed to have spent about an hour and a half inside the shop, getting away with an estimated hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of merchandise, after taking down the alarm system.
“For one second, if you can imagine how would you feel if you built your life and you’re at retirement age and everything you saved up is gone to zero, overnight,” the store owner’s brother Amin Nassiri said.
A GoFundMe donation page has been started to help the owner repair and reopen the family-owned store.
The burglary is nearly identical to a break-in that took place at a jewelry store in Glendale last month, in which the suspects dropped through a roof before using a blowtorch to open a safe.
The post Blowtorch burglars access safes at another Southern California jewelry store appeared first on KTLA.
