By NICO SCAVELLA

THIEVES broke into Home Furniture Company Limited in Palmdale and attempted to steal a safe before making off with electronics and two company vehicles, according to store Credit Manager James Roberts.

It is believed the robbery took place between Sunday afternoon and yesterday morning.

Mr Roberts said he got a call around 7:30am yesterday from another store owner that security guards saw one of Home Furniture’s moving trucks and the company car leaving the area.

When Mr Roberts arrived at Home Furniture, he said no one was there except for “a few employees”.

After inspecting the property, he saw two large holes in the store’s rear walls.

He said he later noticed that the burglars had made another hole into an office to gain access to the store’s alarm panel which was ripped out. This gave them unrestricted movement in the building.

The main target appeared to have been a large safe.

It appeared as though the thieves tried to open the safe with a saw and blowtorch, but were unable to get inside. Then, they apparently tried to remove the safe using a forklift that was removed from the store’s warehouse; the same forklift Mr Roberts said may have been used to bore a hole in the rear wall for the safe to fit through.

The plan failed, however, when the forklift apparently got stuck in the dirt, which prompted the burglars to break in and operate a flatbed truck from a nearby store, the Shoe Depot, to try to pull the forklift out.

When that failed, the burglars stole merchandise from the store and made off in Home Furniture’s moving truck and company car.

According to Mr Roberts, half a dozen to a dozen high-definition televisions were stolen along with a few stereos. He said, however, that the true number of stolen items was still unknown at the time because the robbers also stole items from their warehouse.

He also said that the safe contained nothing but “count cards” and “mainly paperwork”.

Based on the placement of the holes and the fact that they managed to avoid tripping the alarm, many of the other employees, including Mr Roberts believe that the burglars intimately knew the set up of the store.

“They (burglars) must be either familiar or knowledgeable of our alarm systems, because they avoided the motion detectors, they avoided the contacts on the doors,” Mr Roberts said. “Apparently they didn’t open any doors until they ripped out the alarm, which in my mind should have sent a signal to the alarm system because they go back and forth. We got one call just after 5 Sunday morning saying that the southwest door was opened, but after that nothing.”

Mr Roberts said that it’s going to cost “quite a bit of money” to repair all of the damage and the alarm system, and hoped to have the store reopened today. However, after taking the necessary precautionary measures to prevent burglaries, Mr Roberts said there’s very little that he can do at this point to prevent more thefts.

“What can you do? You have alarms, you have cement walls, you have your gates chained too. What else can you do?” he said. “No matter what (you) do, a thief spends more time than you planning how to get by what you have, than you have the money or the time to prevent them. The only way to prevent them is if we had armed guards (here).”

According to Mr Roberts, Home Furniture was plagued with break-ins and vandalisation over the years.

Mr Roberts said police told him yesterday that the company’s truck was located off Montrose Avenue, devoid of the stolen goods and without a trace of the burglars. The truck was returned to the premises, but the car was not found up to press time.

Mr Roberts told The Tribune he is “thankful” that no one was hurt during the robbery and said even though operations were shut down yesterday, he acknowledged that things could have been worse.

“I’m just thankful to God it happened at night when no one was here, so no one was hurt,” Mr Roberts said. “Material things can be replaced; lives can’t. It’s very upsetting, but I’m just glad that no one was hurt.”