A West Village restaurant was one of nine businesses targeted in a string of commercial break-ins across Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens, and the NYPD is asking the public for help identifying the suspect.
The incident happened at about 6:45 a.m. on Saturday, October 24 at American Bar, located at 33 Greenwich Avenue. According to the NYPD, the suspect damaged the restaurant’s front door lock and broke the glass with a hammer but never got inside. Nothing was taken, but the damaged glass door is valued at about $2,000.
The incidents took place between September 27 and October 29 in eight precincts across the city, and almost all of the targets were restaurants. Most of them happened between about 4:30 a.m. and 8 a.m., and in most cases the suspect broke or tampered with a lock to get in.
The same pattern also hit three other businesses in Manhattan. Just after midnight on October 29, the suspect used a hammer to break into a restaurant at 60 Bayard Street and walked off with a cash register holding $410. Earlier in October, an Upper East Side restaurant on Lexington Avenue had its front door smashed with a hammer, causing about $4,375 in damage, and the suspect took $200 and a bottle of vodka. Two days after that, $1,000 was taken from a business in Midtown East after its lock was cut.
The biggest haul came in Queens on October 23, when a restaurant at 28-44 31st Street lost a cash register containing $4,200. The suspect broke into another Queens business that same morning but left empty-handed, and in Brooklyn, one business was entered through a window from a neighboring roof, with two offices damaged.
The NYPD has released images of the suspect taken during the Bayard Street, East 53rd Street and Brooklyn rooftop incidents.
Anyone with relevant information is asked to call the NYPD’s Crime Stoppers Hotline at 1-800-577-TIPS (8477) or for Spanish, 1-888-57-PISTA (74782). The public can also submit their tips by logging onto the CrimeStoppers website or by sending a direct message to @NYPDTips on Twitter. All calls are strictly confidential.
