Would-be burglars who drove a stolen vehicle through the front of a southwest Atlanta beauty supply store early Wednesday but fled without taking anything might have been involved in a second smash-and-grab less than 30 minutes later, police said.
Around 2:30 a.m. Wednesday, officers patrolling in the 2800 block of Greenbriar Parkway heard the burglar alarm going off at the nearby Beauty Master store on Headland Drive, and when they went to investigate, they found that a stolen Chrysler minivan had been backed into the front doors of the store.
Video surveillance from the store, which was also burglarized in a 2011 smash-and-grab, showed that four males got out of the minivan, then ran toward a black four-door sedan and left before police arrived.
According to an Atlanta police incident report, “the suspects may have been involved in another crime at approximately 2:56 a.m.”
In the second incident, officers responding to a business robbery in progress at the West End Pharmacy on Joseph E. Lowery Boulevard were almost struck by a black four-door sedan that was fleeing the pharmacy, which had been broken into and several thousand dollars in prescription medicine taken.
The suspects in the pharmacy burglary threw a brick through a glass window, the reached in the broken window and took prescriptions that had been filled and were stored near the window.
Police pursued the black Dodge Intrepid that had fled the pharmacy, but lost sight of the suspects on Central Avenue, according to the incident report. The Dodge was later found abandoned in the 500 block of Pryor Street.
In June, 2011, the Headland Drive Beauty Master store was one of at least eight metro Atlanta beauty supply stores hit by smash-and-grab burglars during a summer-long crime spree aimed at high-dollar hair extensions.
Meldoshia Winn, who came to Beauty Master later Wednesday morning to shop, said she wasn’t surprised that the store is a target for burglars.
“This is one of the largest hair supply stores that I’ve ever been in,” she said. “They have a lot of things in here.”
Dallas Dejesus has been a sales associate at Beauty Master for several months.
“It’s frustrating,” Dejesus said. “We work hard and it’s just annoying to have to come here and see stuff like this. I don’t understand why people just can’t get a job like we do and work for a living.”
Such crimes “make the customers uncomfortable,” she said. “This morning, someone came in and was like, ‘oh, I don’t feel safe shopping here.’”
Dejesus said that she was “glad the cops came as quick as they did because it could have been worse.”
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