BELLEVUE, Wash. — The Bellevue Police Department has been busy investigating a number of retail robberies as the city’s Louis Vuitton and Nordstrom stores have been hit several times within a matter of months.
The suspects involved in three different retail robberies were in court Monday morning for their arraignment hearing.
Bellevue police say over $100,000 of merchandise was stolen in these three incidents.
In June, the Louis Vuitton store at The Shops at The Bravern was hit twice by the same group.
In the latest sting, Billy Chambers, Memory Yearby and Earnetra Turner stole over $93,000 in bags.
The King County Prosecutor charged all three suspects with two counts of organized retail theft in the first degree.
All three were in court Monday morning and pleaded not guilty.
Detectives found the stolen bags for sale online, set up a buy and arrested Trey Kendall, who was charged with trafficking in stolen property in the first degree.
All four suspects have extensive criminal histories, according to charging documents.
“What we’re noticing is that these specific individuals are incredibly worrisome to the department because of how brazen they are,” said Alycia McKinney, Bellevue Police Department Acting Major. “They disregard the safety of employees, they walk in, they walk past security guards and they take the merchandise and they just walk out. They do have violent past history and criminal history, so we’re really concerned that this could turn violent at some point.”
In another incident, 24-year-old Janay Luckey stole nearly $13,000 from the Nordstrom and Nordstrom Rack stores in Bellevue in October and November 2021.
She is also accused of selling the stolen merchandise online and has been charged with organized retail theft in the first degree and two counts of trafficking in stolen property in the first degree.
Luckey is also charged with five counts of retail theft and trafficking out of Seattle, totaling more than $84,000 in those cases.
In a third incident, 62 bottles of perfume, totaling nearly $7,000, were stolen from an Ulta in Factoria.
One of the suspects was arrested in Kent, and charges are pending against a second suspect who is also a suspect in the Louis Vuitton theft.
“When people rip things off out of stores, if it’s above $750 that can be a felony crime,” said Casey McNerthney, a spokesperson for the King County Prosecutor’s Office. “Below that goes to a different office as a misdemeanor crime. But what we’re doing in the cases that are a few hundred dollars here and there is we’re working with city prosecutors to aggregate those cases to get to the amount over the felony threshold under the law, so that way we can have more accountability and a harsher sentence.”