Easter Sunday heist in Southern California nets thieves $30 million
An L.A. police official said Wednesday that thieves broke into a money storage facility in the San Fernando Valley on Easter Sunday and stole up to $30 million. This was one of the biggest cash thefts in the city’s history.
L.A. Police Department Cmdr. Elaine Morales said the break-in happened Sunday night at an unnamed building in Sylmar that handles and stores cash from businesses all over the area.
Criminals broke into both the building and the safe that held the money, according to Morales. According to law enforcement, the break-in was one of the biggest cash thefts in city history. It also took more money than any protected car theft in the city. There are questions about the break-in.
People who know about the investigation say that thieves broke through the building’s roof to get to the vault. But it is not clear how they got past the alarm system.
Looking at the safe from the outside, there were also no signs of a break-in. The owners of the business, who cops did not name, did not find out about the huge theft until Monday, when they opened the vault.
Someone called the police, and officers from the LAPD’s Mission Division station went to the crime scene to collect evidence.
Law enforcement sources say that very few people would have known about the huge amounts of cash that were kept in that safe, which makes the case even more mysterious.
The break-in was described as complicated, which suggested that the thieves were a group of experienced professionals who knew how to sneak into a secure building without being seen.
The FBI and the LAPD are both looking into the theft, according to a spokesman for the FBI on Wednesday night.
Thieves stole $18.9 million from the site of the old Dunbar Armored plant on Mateo Street on September 12, 1997. That was the biggest cash theft in Los Angeles history. The people who stole were caught in the end.
The theft of gold worth millions of dollars from a Brink’s big rig at a Grapevine truck stop happened almost two years before what happened on Sunday.
