Seattle police find suspected burglar in ceiling after bungled heist
Sep 23, 2019, 4:51 PM
Bergman Luggage in downtown Seattle. (Dion Hinchcliffe, Flickr Creative Commons)
A peculiar burglary attempt in a downtown Seattle luggage store had police fielding a decoy 911 call, climbing into walls, and finding a suspect hiding in a ceiling.
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The odd saga began when a 911 call came in at 3:30 a.m. on Friday, from the alarm company protecting Bergman Luggage in downtown Seattle.
When police arrived on-scene, they spied a man “skittering on his belly toward the store’s cash register.”
Law enforcement then surrounded the building before another 911 call came in, this time claiming that there was a shooting involving “several people” six blocks away from the luggage store.
One officer was sent to check in on the alleged shooting, finding that it was a false alarm. The other officers on the scene remained, before entering the building with a K9 team.
They soon discovered that rather than breaking the glass in the storefront, the burglars had gotten in through a large hole in the wall, roughly 10 feet off the ground. An officer climbed up on a ladder and into the hole, where a fresh trail of blood was found.
After hearing a noise on the other side of the wall, two officers climbed through the hole and into the abandoned restaurant neighboring the luggage store. It’s there that they found a 29-year-old man hiding under a table in the restaurant and a 35-year-old man stashed in the ceiling.
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Police suspect they were responsible for the 911 call of a reported shooting, intended to lure them away from the scene of the would-be burglary.
After booking the pair into King County Jail, officers seized a crowbar, rubber gloves, a lock-pick kit, binoculars, and a hand-held Pac Man video game.
