ROARING FORK BROADCASTING COMPANY
A group of five men equipped with blowtorches, saws, drills, hammers and crowbars in the wee hours of Monday morning broke into a downtown store that sells luxury watches and jewelry but were spooked away when Aspen police arrived in response to a burglary alarm.
That’s according to an account provided by a store manager at Avi & Co. at 602 E. Cooper Ave. on Monday afternoon.
The manager said he responded to the store around 1:30 a.m. after the alarm activated. Based on his reviewing of surveillance footage in the shop and an inspection of the premises, the manager said, “Nothing in the vault was touched, but I’m still ascertaining what’s missing in the cabinets. We have gift boxes, travel cases, some accessories like hats, but nothing as valuable as what’s in the vault.”
The manager asked that his name not be used because he is a witness to a criminal investigation. Aspen police confirmed the burglary incident but provided limited details about it. No arrests were made, said Assistant Police Chief Bill Linn.
“An officer responded and interrupted a burglary in process,” Linn said, adding that the APD is responding to the incident with a “very active investigation.”
Linn said he was “being deliberately vague” about details of the incident because it is under investigation, but he provided some information.
“Right now,” he said, “with the investigation we’re conducting, it does not look like the suspects are local.”
He urged businesses to stay vigilant.
“This case, as with a lot of cases that are successfully resolved, video surveillance is absolutely key to reconstructing things after the fact, but also having a good alarm system and updating your contact info with the police department so that when the alarm goes off we can contact you,” Linn said.
Those issues were not factors with the Avi & Co. incident, he said.
Linn said APD is using “a lot of resources” to investigate the incident, a coordinated burglary. The suspects disabled the store’s motion sensors by spraypainting them, cut off the building’s electricity and returned to the scene of the crime roughly an hour after the police left the scene, the manager said.
“The police showed up — they couldn’t get in until I got here — so the police stood by but the criminals left, but then apparently they came back through the holes that they punched maybe an hour or two or later to see if they could get anything,” the manager said.
Video surveillance revealed their return to the storefront, he said, noting the burglars disabled the alarm after it activated on their initial break-in. It did not appear they had success stealing anything on their second visit, but the manager said he was not done assessing the situation.
The burglars, all wearing either hoodies or masks and speaking Spanish, accessed the shop by first breaking through the former Mezzaluna space that’s being converted into a new restaurant, the manager said. Avi & Co. is located in Hunter Plaza, a combination of retail, dining and office spaces.
“They broke in through the restaurant that is currently under construction behind us,” the manager said. “They broke into the restaurant, and once they got into the restaurant, they broke into the gallery that connects to it wall-to-wall, and from the gallery wall, they broke into our wall and just the store’s back office. They were rummaging through the cabinet drawers to try and look for valuable merchandise. Thankfully all of that per usual was locked up in the vaults. But they cut the power off, they spraypainted the motion sensors; they cut off all of the electric endings connected to the alarm system.”
He added, “They had blowtorches, they had saws, they had impact drills, hammers, crowbars.”
The Aspen location opened earlier this year, joining Avi & Co. storefronts in Miami and New York. The company is a retailer of high-end watches and other luxury accessories; some watches sell for more than $400,000.
“Our new Aspen, Colorado, location offers a range of unique custom-made diamond jewelry, including earrings, necklaces, bracelets, and rings. Adorning the glass displays are prestigious timepieces such as Richard Mille, Patek Philippe, Audemars Piguet, Rolex, and more,” says Avi’s website.