Plate Glass Fell ‘Just Like a Guillotine’ : A Simple Theft Goes Wrong--and a Life is Lost

It looked to the would-be burglar like what it should have been: an easy heist on an empty street on a quiet Sunday night.

But something went wrong, and instead of investigating the simple smash-and-grab theft of some clothes from a women’s boutique, police found the burglar--dying in a welter of his own blood.

The 33-year-old transient, whose name has not been released, had squeezed apart the steel grating and kicked in the glass door of a Los Angeles garment district clothing store about 10:40 p.m. Sunday, police said.

It is the kind of burglary, say police, that happens all the time. Except for this:

As the man crept inside through the ragged hole he had made, the unbroken heavy plate glass at the top of the door, jarred loose by the kick, suddenly slid down in the door frame, “just like a guillotine” said Police Sgt. Robert Gale.

The man’s right leg was all but severed above the knee.

Somehow, he managed to climb back out through the hole in the door. Somehow, he dragged himself half a block up Los Angeles Street, and then east a few yards on 8th Street, the nearly amputated leg streaming blood along the sidewalk all the way.

There, in front of a manufacturing building, he collapsed, and there he died. The glass had slashed his femoral artery, said a coroner’s spokesman, and he died of loss of blood.

When a radio call summoned two Los Angeles police officers to the store, it was the glittering shards of glass they saw first, Gale said, then the blood.

They followed the trail of blood up the street and around the corner to where the man lay unconscious--dying. An ambulance team could do nothing for him, and 22 minutes after the shattering glass triggered the store’s silent alarm, he died.

“Apparently when he kicked it in, it came down just like a guillotine,” said Gale. “They have a chance of doing that.”

On Monday, stains of blood were still visible on the sidewalk, but inside Aviance Inc., the store that had been broken into, the mess of blood and glass splinters had been cleaned up and a new piece of glass was already in the door, manager Ziva Kashanian said.

The shop had been broken into once before, she said, by someone who had made off with a couple of suits from the window display. This time, Kashanian said softly, they lost nothing. She said, “I’d rather he take something and not die.”