A burglary in Fairfield has left a local computer store $20,000 in the hole.
Around 5:25 a.m. Sunday morning two thieves broke into EB Computers at 1827 Fairfield Rd., walking away with 20 laptops, both PC and Mac.
“I thought we had a good security system, we have bars in our windows and a double lock,” said owner Brad Wowryk. “But they bypassed it, came inside and within 40 seconds grabbed 20 laptops.”
Wowryk said that they’d had a low-resolution surveillance camera in place, and that he and some staff members watched the recording to see the thieves at work, before an unfortunate automatic schedule wiped the data from the system.
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“It didn’t show a lot, but we did see them,” Wowryk said. “But, we don’t have it anymore.”
Wowryk said they called police when the robbery was discovered Sunday morning, but they did not arrive until Monday afternoon.
Consequently, several other people had to come into the shop Sunday night to replace the lock and install better security features so that EB Computers could open for business Monday morning.
Victoria Police were able to confirm the incident and that they did visit later on Monday.
“Due to call load and other priority calls, we were unable to attend until the afternoon on December 17th,” said Victoria Police Spokesperson Const. Matt Rutherford in an emailed response. “While we make every effort to attend every call promptly, lower priority calls sometimes have a delay. We have seen this delay getting longer and longer and that is one of the reasons why we’ve requested additional resources both last year, and this year.”
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Wowryk said the store does have insurance that will hopefully cover the loss, but that it’s a devastating time for the theft to happen just before Christmas.
He also warned other store owners to be wary about potentially similar incidents.
“These people seemed pretty organized, they knew what they were doing,” he said. “These are high-standard commercial locks, but they still got in.”