14 DAY TRIAL // Thieves cut a hole in the roof of a Best Buy department store in New Jersey, then dropped down 16-feet to scoop up almost two dozen MacBooks, police arriving at the scene have determined. Leaving the same way they had entered the premises, the criminals ran away with $26,000 worth of Apple laptops without setting off any alarm.
New Jersey Real-Time News informs that the police arriving at the scene were baffled by the "high-level planning" a heist like this would require to pull off. "High level of sophistication," Detective James Ryan, a police department spokesman, said. "They never set off any motion sensors. They never touched the floor. They rappelled in and rappelled out."
The missing laptops were discovered by employees opening the store at 06:30 a.m, on Thursday morning. They also noticed a gaping hole in the ceiling, which confirmed whatever doubts there might have been regarding the theft. According to the same report, detective Ryan discovered that the thieves left boot prints on the gas pipe, which runs up the side of the building in Monmouth Junction. Other findings were that the thieves used a saw to cut through the roof, which has several inches of rubber and insulation, and then sliced a three-foot-wide square hole, to be able to drop 16 feet to ten-foot-tall racks inside the store.
Contact with the floor would have set off an alarm, people with knowledge of these matters say. According to John Harris, an expert in security who has consulted on thousands of burglaries, the effort was daring and unusual, the New Jersey paper reports. "I would say they were a professional crew," Harris said. "At least I’ve never dealt with anything like this. From time to time, people break in, but not usually through the roof."
South Brunswick police and Detective Ryan say they’ve never seen anything that required this much effort and premeditation. "The tools they had to bring, the alarms they had to circumvent — it certainly required a lot of high-level planning," Ryan explained.