Burglars Ransack Red Bear Brewing Company
Two unidentified suspects used a sledgehammer to break into Red Bear Brewing Company and ransacked the bar looking for money.
Early Monday morning, two unknown suspects broke into Red Bear Brewing Company, a gay-owned bar in Northeast D.C., ransacking it in an apparent search for money.
Simon Bee, the director of operations for Red Bear and one of the bar’s co-owners, told Metro Weekly that he received a call from the alarm company around 2:43 a.m., indicating that someone had broken in.
“Every now and then we get a false signal, but never at that time of the morning,” Bee said. “So I knew something was up. So I told them to dispatch police, and then a few minutes later, I got a call from the police, saying there was a break-in and that I needed to head down there.”
Bee said “the police scoped everything. They even sent dogs in to make sure there wasn’t somebody still in there. Once they figured out that there was nobody in there, we went in and kind of took a look at the damage.”
The front glass door to Red Bear had been smashed. One of the cash registers from behind the bar had been thrown on the floor, although no money had been taken. The door to the office had been bludgeoned and forced open, with the office ransacked, but the would-be thieves did not appear to have made off with any loot.
Nothing was missing from the bar’s inventory.
“We have a safe, but we really don’t keep a lot of cash on hand anyway,” Bee said, adding that he believes the intruders saw the safe in the office but could not open it. “The safe is very large and robust. So I really think they probably quickly figured out that it just wasn’t going to happen.”
Surveillance video shows two individuals in baggy, hooded clothing, but their faces are unrecognizable.
“Later on, in the day, we got some of the footage from the patio from our landlord, and you could see the two being dropped off by a gray sedan,” he said. “They ran up, they definitely knew what they were doing. They had a sledgehammer, hit the door a few times until it finally broke, and then went inside. They came out three or four minutes later and got picked up. You could see them hiding for a few minutes, and then once their getaway car came, they got picked up and took off.”
That police told the Red Bear owners that there had been other reports of break-ins in D.C.’s Near Northeast neighborhood.
The car that picked up the burglars was a silver hatchback. While Bee could not identify the car’s model or the license plate number, someone else did. He saw a news bulletin on D.C. FOX affiliate WTTG that included reports of various break-ins throughout the District of Columbia, and saw a picture on the website of a silver getaway car.
“It was the same car that was in our surveillance video, so at least I know the cops know about it,” he says.
The Metropolitan Police Department has enlisted the help of 100 police recruits to help protect retail businesses during the busy holiday shopping season. Police say they’ve made more than 1,000 retail theft arrests this year. In March, the D.C. Council passed emergency legislation that allows prosecutors to pursue stiffer charges and penalties against retail burglars.
Bee said the damage to the space was relatively minimal and estimates the dollar amount of damage to be in the ballpark of $3,000. The bar is submitting a claim and expects that their insurance will cover the cost of repairs.
He credited the MPD with a quick response to the report of the break-in, noting that they arrived on site “before I even got my socks on.”
He noted that the reaction to the burglary from community members and patrons has been heartwarming.
“It was nothing but love and support in response to our Facebook post,” he said.
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