A major break-in took place at the RONA Building Centre last weekend, and police are looking for help identifying the man and woman caught on tape leaving the building.
Employees arrived at the store Saturday morning to find a major theft occurred sometime overnight. They didn’t know exactly what had been taken at that point, but it didn’t look good, said store general manager Bobby McLelland, sitting in his truck outside while police were inside.
“To what extreme… it’s bad,” he said.
He said thieves cut the wires to the building to disable the security system, which included alarms and video cameras. No alarm went off when the break-in occurred. Police say the suspects also damaged the hard drive for the video surveillance system.
The suspects appeared to have cut a fence at the side of the building to gain entrance into the garden centre yard. They then smashed the windows of the main building, broke into the store, and made off with what they could — including a number of Makita brand power tools and an unknown amount of cash. The value of what was stolen is estimated in the thousands of dollars.
McClelland said they also ransacked the Vic Van Isle offices upstairs. “This affects the whole community,”he said.
Somewhat fortunately, the suspects weren’t completely successful in destroying the security system and police were able to extract images of the culprits from the video surveillance system.
One suspect is described as a white male, wearing shorts, a dark hoodie, white shirt, running shoes, a blue cap and white glasses. The other was a white female wearing a light blue hoodie with dark knicker style pants, gloves and shoes.
The Revelstoke Bottle Depot was also broken into, but owner Harman Dhanoa said they only had about $200 stolen.
Anyone with information about the break-in is asked to call the RCMP detachment at 250-837-5255 or Crime Stoppers at 1-800-222-8477.
