BALTIMORE — The car arrives with purpose just before 3:00 in the morning, driving straight to the 6300 York Road Shopping Center and backing into a spot where three people can be seen jumping out and proceeding to smash store front windows to burglarize three restaurants that were closed for business.
An employee at Vito’s Pizza, Antonio Romeo, describes what the burglars left behind.
“The police called the house and we came over here and we saw all the mess over there, the glass and the cash register was down and just kind of a mess,” said Romeo. “We had to clean up all this stuff. It was terrible.”
A separate surveillance outside the pizzeria shows the burglars throwing things into the front window and then kicking out the broken glass.
Less than two minutes after arriving in the lot, the criminals then drove away.
The smash and grabs appear to have started an hour earlier, just before 2 a.m., here at this pizza parlor in Belvedere Square.
Here, the criminals moved so quickly, they may have overlooked the one thing they really wanted the most.
“The drawer was sitting there wide open,” said John Davis. “Money on top. We don’t usually leave money around and just by some chance, one of the main people wasn’t in last night and money was sitting in the drawer and they left it.”
You could call it the perils of being a smash-and-grab burglar.
So focused on the smash that they sometimes fail at the grab.
It’s a high-risk crime in a time when high-resolution cameras are everywhere and most businesses deal more with electronic payments than cash.
