For the second time in less than a week, a weave thief targeting high-dollar hair extensions used a stolen vehicle to ram through the front of an Atlanta beauty supply store.
About 4:30 a.m. Wednesday, a man drove a U-Haul truck through the front of J&J Beauty Supply in the 2000 block of Sylvan Road before running off with a box of hair weaves.
Atlanta police Capt. Adam Lee III told the AJC that the truck was apparently stolen from a nearby business.
“The owner is assessing how much was stolen and the damage,” Lee said. “It looks like the damage is far more extensive than what was taken.”
Lee said the burglar in Wednesday’s heist was apparently working alone. He said detectives were examining security video of the incident.
Store owner Joy Kim said this was the first time her store had been burglarized since opening five months ago. She said the thief took about $2,000 in hair.
Curtis Weathersbee witnessed the burglary.
He said he saw the burglar – a “young fellow” – take the truck, drive up the street, then turn around and drive back through the parking lot and into the front of the store.
“It sounded like a boom first, then the glass started to popping every which way,” Weathersbee said. “I believe I had a mild heart attack and didn’t even realize it.”
Last Thursday, thieves hit the Beauty Depot in the 800 block of Martin Luther King Jr. Drive, ramming a stolen car through the front doors of the store before taking packages of hair extensions from the wall.
The burglars in that incident fled in another car, leaving the stolen vehicle partially inside the store. They made off with about $2,000 in hair weaves.
In February, a Midtown CVS store was broken into by hair thieves, and in December thieves took hair extensions from SJ Beauty and Salon in downtown Conyers.
Last September, burglars stole hair strands worth more than $100,000 from the Beauty Master store on Mt. Zion Road in Morrow. That store’s general manager, Lucien Poko, told the AJC at the time that five of the seven Beauty Master stores that he runs in metro Atlanta had been burglarized.
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