The piercing alarm alone should have sent the burglar running. Instead, caught on security cameras, he's able to silence it and continue stealing from inside a locked and shuttered store, ironically with an empty police car parked out front.
"Stealing money from the register, steals my phones," store owner Ben Rafeh said.
It's maddening, he says, because police were notified when the first alarm went off more than an hour and twenty five minutes before the thief is seen entering the store.
"Taking his sweet time like he owns the business, like nothing is going on. Nobody is going to come. Nobody is going to bother him," Rafeh said.
At 4:49 pm, Ben received an email alert from ADT Security that a motion sensor in the back of the store has been tripped. The thief came in through a door in broad daylight, but he could not break through an interior metal grated door.
He tripped a silent motion sensor alarm and Ben says /*Newark*/ police are first notified by ADT Security, but for the next hour and 25 minutes the thief spent his time breaking through the wall and ceiling and climbing into a store room.
At 6:14, Ben says the thief is seen on security cameras entering the store and setting off the loud alarm. He disabled it and stole a cash box and twenty phones, leaving at 6:19.
Police showed up around 8:30 p.m., Ben says.
Back in early May, Ben showed Eyewitness News what happened during the second burglary at the store when the thief had 90 minutes to enter through the front security gates. He claims officers told him there are only three overnight patrol cars in the sector.
This time?
"It was a dispatcher's mistake," Rafeh said.
Rafeh says he has lost $25,000 dollars in merchandise in three /*burglaries*/.
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