CAUGHT ON CAMERA: Seattle store burglarized 12 times in 18 months

SEATTLE — Surveillance video from a downtown business shows nearly a dozen people shuffling in to steal product in what the owner believes was a ‘targeted’ attack – the burglary is said to be the twelfth in the last year and a half.

For the last 28-years, locals and tourists alike have found their one-stop-shop for Seattle-centric swag, on the corner of 1st Avenue and Pine Street – Simply Seattle.

“We’ve really worked hard to bring in Storm gear and Sonic gear and just celebrate what makes Seattle cool from a sports standpoint and from a cultural standpoint,” said owner, Jamie Munson. “It’s a small local company, we like to find the unique things that no one else has.”

Shoppers came in and out throughout the day Thursday, browsing the different sections and sifting through walls of merchandise.

Alongside sweeping exterior windows there is now a door, boarded up with a fresh piece of plywood, and shattered glass peppered across the sidewalk.

“My phone buzzed at four a.m. with the little alarm sound,” said Munson. “I was like, ‘oh no, not again.”

Security cameras inside the business captured the incident as a person breaks a hole into the plywood that was covering the door, and heads inside.

Nearly a dozen people can then be seen crawling through the hole, stuffing their bags full of high-ticket items and taking off.

“It seemed very focused, very targeted,” said Munson. “It was very quick, very active.”

The plywood was meant to be a temporary solution, following a burglary last week that left the glass broken out of the door.

“It just felt violating, if you will, just people coming in through the door one after another, taking advantage of the door we had broken out last week that was plywooded up,” Munson said.

Munson said the thieves made away with the new Storm team gear, which had just been stocked, and entire racks of Sonic jerseys (which cost about $130 a piece).

In total, he estimates it was about 15-thousand dollars’ worth of product.

“It’s just haunting to feel that sort of experience of people coming into your store and just looting you basically,” Munson said.

To make matters worse, this isn’t the first time this has happened to them – as mentioned, it happened again just last week… but it wasn’t the second time either.

“I’ve kind of lost track to be honest,” Munson said. “Our window repair people, and the insurance person are on speed dial, sadly.”

Munson believes this was the twelfth burglary incident they’ve had to deal with in the last 18 months.

“We worked hard to curate this cool collection of things that other people don’t have and for some reason we’re just now a target and it’s hard to have to deal with that and see it,” he said.

Munson said they’ve toyed with the idea of locking up pricey product or putting bars on the windows.

“All of those are expensive solution and I also think they communicate an inhospitable message to downtown and we don’t want to be about that,” Munson said.

Munson said moving is out of the question because, not only do they have a lease, but it’s also in their name.

“Our name is Simply Seattle, and that’s who we want to be and what we want to be about… being in the heart of downtown,” he explained.

The idea of moving operations 100-percent online has also come up, but Munson does not want to lose the one-on-one interaction with people in the community.

When it comes to insurance, they are covered. But they can’t file a claim every time they are burgled.

In many instances, the amount of stolen product and damage does not equate to their deductible, so, for them, it doesn’t make sense to file a claim and have their premiums go up.

“We’re always doing this dance of like, does it make sense to [file a claim] or not, this one [we] probably will for sure because it’s big enough, but we’ve had a number of them over the last year where we’ve just had to eat cost… there’s no point in filing the insurance claim if it’s just going to come back to bite us,” Munson explained.

On a larger scale, the Downtown Seattle Association (DSA) is working to revitalize the neighborhood and help bring patrons back to the area which was hit hard by the pandemic.

According to DSA, 80-percent of downtown businesses were able to reopen following the COVID-forced closures. And while they have seen 279 new dining, retail and service-related street-level businesses since January of last year – in that same timeframe, 462 closed permanently.

DSA and the business improvement district it manages, the Metropolitan Improvement District, are currently directing a more than 3-million-dollar package to aide in the recovery of downtown Seattle.

The package includes enhanced cleaning and beautification efforts, homeless outreach, public art installations, community events and a communications & marketing campaign. It also allocates 150-thousand dollars for enhanced police presence.

Still, even DSA is calling for more. DSA sent the following statement to KIRO-7.

“Our businesses that have managed to stay open through the pandemic can’t afford the additional burden of the persistent shoplifting. Our city and county leaders need to figure out how to solve what has become a costly and common concern for far too many businesses.”

Sadly, for businesses like Simply Seattle, finding a way to put an end to the theft isn’t so simple.

“We don’t have the answer, but we do know we love Seattle and we want to be a part of the solution,” said Munson.

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