Within the course of a few short weeks, three local businesses were hit with eerily similar break-ins. In all cases, the method of entry was the same: a pickup truck rammed through the front of the building. Their target also appeared to be the same: ATM machines.
During the night on Thursday, October 18, a neighbour across the street from New B’s Café and Store in New Bothwell heard a commotion. She arose to witness a crime underway at the neighbourhood café and called 911. The crime, she told New B’s owner Elle Funk, took little more than a minute to carry out before they sped off.
RCMP were on the scene shortly after. They assessed the damage, secured the building, and called Funk. A white truck was recovered that night in a field just west of New Bothwell. The truck’s occupants were missing. All that was left of the stolen ATM machine was the outer cage.
In almost five years of business, this was Funk’s first break-in. She’s shocked at the amount of damage that was caused for a simple cash machine, which appeared to be the vandals’ only target. No other merchandise was missing.
Funk says the 24-hour-access ATM machine had been installed in the front of the building with outside access so that residents could use it after store hours.
“That’s a service that I like to provide,” Funk says. “Up until I owned the place, there was no [public] ATM at all.”
To date, she hasn’t heard any news of arrests. Her focus since that night has been to clean up the premises and resume business as usual. The cost to repair the extensive damage to her building is still being worked out.
“We have to get a whole window, the ATM and the cage all have to get repaired,” Funk says. “The awning is completely wrecked and some stucco on the outside will have to get fixed. We’re not sure on exact numbers yet.”
In spite of the inconvenience, frustration, and impending costs, Funk was immediately encouraged by family, friends, and community residents who arrived early that morning and undertook a massive clean-up effort. By mid-afternoon, she was back in business.
Four days later, on Monday, October 22, Sylvie Forest received a call from her alarm company during the night. The alarm had been tripped at her Shell station in Niverville. For Forest, this was her fifth break-in in less than two years of business.
Based on information shared with Forest, a neighbour living behind the business awoke to the commotion and called the RCMP, providing tips on the type of vehicle and which direction it was headed after the break-in. Police used the evidence to track the vehicle, which had been abandoned with a flat tire on a gravel road a few miles from town. The Police Dog Services unit was called in from Selkirk with the hopes of finding the criminals in the bushes nearby, but the search came up empty.
“I’m very impressed with the RCMP and how they handled this,” says Forest. “They did their job.”
Forest and an RCMP officer immediately scanned through the surveillance camera footage, which showed the pickup being backed into the building numerous times until it finally broke through and skidded to a halt inside the building.
“It looks like there were three of them in the truck,” Forest says. “Two of them ran in, one of them jumped over my counter, and there was nothing to steal. So they went to the ATM and started trying to break it, but there’s no cash there. Then they ran out.”
The criminals on camera wore dark clothing, balaclavas, and gloves. While they were in and out fairly quickly, Forest says it was quite evident that they were inexperienced criminals.
The video footage also revealed another interesting fact. The vehicle used to commit the crime belonged to a frequent customer of hers. A phone call to the owner in the middle of the night indicated that he was still unaware, at that point, that his vehicle had been stolen only hours earlier.
Due to the extent of the damage, Forest wasn’t able to resume business quite as quickly as Funk was. All of the wiring for the business’s equipment lay within the wall that the vehicle had rammed, leaving the internet, cash machines, and lottery terminals completely down.
“All of our wiring comes out of the corner that they hit,” Forest said. “I had three or four techs from Lotteries and Shell [Corporate] coming in. It was like piecing a puzzle back together. We got some stuff back up and running the next day. We weren’t fully operational until about Tuesday around noon.”
But reconstruction of the interior will still be required and, by the time all is said and done, Forest estimates that she will have lost about three days’ worth of sales. In the meantime, Forest is unsure of what more she can do to prevent future break-ins.
“Every break-in was so different,” says Forest. “If they want to come in, they’re going to find a way to come in. But my cigarettes and my lottery and cash is locked up pretty tight, so good luck getting to those. Basically now it’s just trying to stop them from getting in.”
Both of these incidents appear to be copycats of a break-in that took place at a Landmark grocery store on September 19. There, too, the front door was smashed in and the ATM machine carried out. Police later located the pickup in a farmer’s field south of Landmark. It was identified as a vehicle that had been stolen from a residence in Niverville.
On the night of October 13, Niverville Bigway had also been struck, but this time under different circumstances. The thieves were successful in breaking through the front door, which tripped the alarm. The RCMP arrived in time to scout the place out, but the thieves were gone. According to video surveillance footage, the criminals were in and out within mere minutes. Their target: cigarettes and liquor. In their haste to exit the building, the liquor was forgotten.
“I was satisfied with the RCMP response time,” says John Schmitke, owner of the store.
According to Schmitke’s video footage, the thieves parked their vehicle behind the Subway restaurant across the street. Two perpetrators on foot forcefully broke the glass on the front door and let themselves in. They made off with an undisclosed amount of cigarettes, and that’s it.
While the damage wasn’t nearly as extensive as the other two break-ins, Schmitke wasted no time in installing safeguards to help prevent this kind of product loss in the future. And, he hopes, if criminals take the time to stake out the business in advance, they’ll see the impediments that they face.
“I’ve since bought two safes for all the tobacco, lottery, and petty cash,” says Schmitke. “They are bolted to the concrete floor. The amount of time it would take to get access to any of the contents now is most likely longer than it would take for the RCMP to arrive on the scene.”
“Forensic Identification Services has been assisting with these investigations,” says Corporal Courchaine of the RCMP Media Relations office. “Investigation is ongoing on all incidents.”
