A trio of masked burglars busted into a Chicago lingerie shop leaving the store littered with lace and broken glass after making off with cash and merchandise Monday night, surveillance video shows.
Dramatic footage shows the burglars breaking through a window of Journelle in the city’s Bucktown neighborhood on the 1700 block of North Damen Avenue. They go straight for the register before making their way through the store, rifling through drawers, filling bags with expensive lingerie.
They were in the store for less than five minutes.
Owner Ariane Sabatini said she got a call from her alarm company shortly after closing the store. She returned to find the shattered glass and lingerie strewn throughout the store.
“I just don’t understand the mindset, I really don’t, plus there’s no street value,” she said.
Sabatini says she thinks the burglars tried unsuccessfully to get into the neighboring designer jeans shop before throwing rocks at her windows and then pushing through the broken glass.
“This is a very intimate environment—lingerie—so it’s already a safe place for women to come and deal with an intimate situation,” she said. “To be violated in such an intimate setting really cuts deep.”
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Sabatini hopes by sharing the video of the break-in at her store, she may be able to keep it from happening to someone else.
“Every day on the news it’s somebody else—and today it was just us,” she said.
Sabatini recently started a neighborhood watch for business owners a few months ago, she said, because so many local shops were having problems with crime.
She says the silver lining is the way other businesses are now supporting her.
