More than 1,000 objects, including jewelry, daguerreotypes, laptops, antique Native American woven goods and other artifacts, were stolen recently from the Oakland Museum of California, the Oakland Police Department announced on Wednesday.
According to the police, just before 3:30 a.m. on Oct. 15, someone broke into the museum’s off-site storage facility where the objects were kept. No museum staff members were present at the time of the burglary, which was not discovered until Oct. 16.
The museum has said that it waited to announce the theft to the public because it feared compromising its investigation, which the Oakland police are conducting with the F.B.I.’s art crimes division.
“The theft that occurred represents a brazen act that robs the public of our state’s cultural heritage,” Lori Fogarty, the museum’s executive director, said in a statement released on Wednesday. “We are working in close partnership with the City of Oakland, the Oakland Police Department and the F.B.I. to see that these objects are returned.”
It is unclear how many people were involved in the robbery, and the museum has not yet determined the total value of the stolen items.
A spokeswoman for the museum said officials there believed the theft was “a crime of opportunity, not a sophisticated heist by seasoned criminals.”
A representative for the F.B.I. did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
While a majority of the items stolen were common memorabilia such as political pins, award ribbons and souvenir tokens, other objects included neckpieces by the artist Florence Resnikoff, who was based in Oakland, and a pair of scrimshawed walrus tusks carved in the 19th century.
The Oakland Museum of California describes itself as “a leading cultural institution of the Bay Area and a resource for the research and understanding of California’s dynamic cultural and environmental heritage.” According to the museum, its collection contains more than two million objects.
The storage facility, in a separate location from the museum’s main campus in downtown Oakland, holds many objects that are available to researchers and curators. Fogarty told reporters on Wednesday that the facility was protected by security cameras and an alarm system.
The announcement of the Oakland burglary comes as the police in France arrested five more people in connection to the brazen theft of some of the country’s crown jewels, worth more than $100 million, from the Louvre in Paris on Oct. 19. French authorities arrested two other suspects in that crime earlier in the week.
Reggie Ugwu is a Times culture reporter.
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