EDMONTON -- The owner of a music store on Edmonton’s south side is hoping surveillance video will lead to the return of roughly $13,000 in stolen instruments, after a break-in early Tuesday morning.
The video appears to show two people inside Innovations Music, grabbing multiple bass guitars from the store’s racks.
“I’m thinking that these are people that have been in our store before,” Innovations Music co-owner Martha Livingstone told CTV News Edmonton. “These were people who knew what they were getting because they went right in and they picked through the basses.”
According to Livingstone, one of the stolen basses, a Fender 60th anniversary edition, is valued at over $3,000.
“They worked really fast,” she said. “You could almost see who they were.”
The owner says the crooks also caused about $5,000 in damages to the store during the break-in.
Innovations Music shared the surveillance video online in the hopes that someone sees it and recognizes the culprits.
“These are people that probably have broken into other stores and probably break into people’s houses,” said Livingstone.
City police tell CTV News Edmonton they are investigating the incident.
“The police are being great,” said Livingstone. “They’ve got all the serial numbers, it’s all in a database, they know what items were stolen, and so if anybody tries to buy or sell those instruments, there’s going to be flags going up.”
This isn’t the first break-in the store has experienced.
Livingstone says over the store’s 27 years in business, multiple break-ins have driven insurance premiums up to a point where they don’t feel they’re worth paying anymore.
That said, the owner remains optimistic that the perpetrators will be caught and the stolen instruments will be returned.
“I’ve seen other people that have been caught this way,” she said. “We really want to get these people out of doing what they’re doing.”
With files from Jeremy Thompson
