A masked and gloved burglar pried open the front door of Hickok’s Trading Company early Sunday morning, making off with an estimated $100,000 in gold jewelry in minutes.
“He knew what he was doing,” said co-owner and longtime Juneau resident Pat Hickok. “He took the most expensive things we had in the store.”
The burglary happened just before 5 a.m., Hickok said, adding that it was caught on the store’s surveillance video.
“The man took a crowbar and took all the wood off the sides” around the door, she said. “He bypassed the locks to get the door off. He kept his head down, he didn’t look around. He went right to the jewelry and grabbed the trays of rings.”
The burglar, who was wearing a ski mask and a jumpsuit, stole 72 rings and was in and out in less than three minutes, Hickok said.
“He was a professional, not that I want to give him credit,” she said. “He was well-prepared. … This guy knew what he was looking for.”
Hickok said her business, which she and husband Terry opened 22 years ago, has been burglarized twice in the past year. The building has been broken into three other times, she believes by transients looking for a place to sleep.
“We’ve been too trusting,” she said. “For years, we didn’t even lock our doors; you just didn’t have to. But it’s not the same place (anymore).”
On Wednesday, Terry Hickok was planning to put security bars on all the plate glass windows in the front of the business, in the 200 block of South Franklin Street right across from a popular tourist attraction, the Red Dog Saloon.
After five separate incidents in that building alone in the last year, Pat Hickok said, “It just seems like a lot.”
Property crimes definitely have been on the rise in Juneau, with a jump in robberies between 2014 and 2015; burglaries have skyrocketed even more, from 103 in 2014 to 169 in 2015. The exact number of burglaries in 2016 was not available but reportedly topped 300.
Hickok is frustrated with the lack of a police presence downtown, she said, although she doesn’t blame the Juneau Police Department, which she says “does a good job with what they have.” JPD has patrol teams of four to six officers, plus a sergeant, that divide the town with half policing the downtown area and Douglas, and the other half patrolling from Bartlett Regional Hospital past Mendenhall Valley on 12-hour shifts.
Hickok lays the blame for inadequate law enforcement staffing on the City and Borough of Juneau and on laws that are too lax.
“The city council should be looking at things and giving our city back to us,” she said. “If the city could get tourism money and double the police force, we would have a better chance of cleaning up our town. … It’s maddening to me.”
Correction: In an earlier version of this story, Hickok was misspelled.
• Contact reporter Liz Kellar at 523-2246 or liz.kellar@juneauempire.com.
