Breaking In Was Easier Than This Route Out : Reseda: A man dials 911 for rescuers after entering through a liquor store’s roof and setting off an alarm.

Breaking in was the easy part for Robert Laughton.

An unemployed contractor, he knew just how to peel back a rooftop air-conditioning vent so that he could drop down into the Reseda liquor store.

Getting back out, however, was another matter.

The doors and windows of Rick’s Liquor were barred and Laughton couldn’t reach the hole that he had cut in the ceiling.

What to do?

As the store’s siren alarm blared in the background, Laughton picked up the phone and dialed 911. Then he confessed his crime and asked Los Angeles police if they would come let him out, please.

He’d wait.

When obliging officers arrived early Sunday, Laughton was sitting on the floor with his back against the counter, smoking a Benson & Hedges and sipping a warm can of Coors Extra Gold.

But officers, too, had a problem: how to get him out to arrest him on suspicion of burglary.

It was only after they suggested Laughton poke around the Saticoy Street store that he found the answer, resting against a wall in a back room 15 feet from where he’d sat waiting for police--a ladder that could have made his escape as easy as his entry.

“He wasn’t the smartest burglar in the world, let’s put it that way,” Sgt. Roger Ferguson said hours later. “Usually, burglars don’t come gift-wrapped like this. We took him from one cell and put him in another. Now he’s a guest in our jail.”

The 23-year-old Reseda resident was being held in lieu of $5,000 bail.

The botched burglary began about 3:30 a.m. Sunday. After climbing onto the roof from a trash dumpster in the alley, he apparently used a pair of metal snips to clip through the vent. He squeezed through a two-foot opening and dropped about 10 feet into the store, landing between the Milk Duds and La Victoria salsa, clipping a shelf of flour on the way.

His problems began immediately when his arrival set off the store’s motion-sensing alarm. After frantically searching for a way to escape, Laughton apparently “came to the horrible conclusion that he could not get out,” Ferguson said.

Police said the 911 operator did not believe that she was really talking to a burglar asking to be arrested.

Ferguson said Laughton had to insist: “I’m in the liquor store. I’ll give up.”

He was finishing his second beer by the time officers pulled up about 3:50.

Minutes later, store owner Duane Jaffe arrived with the key and turned off the alarm.

As police led the handcuffed Laughton away, he told Jaffe that he would send a friend by later to pick up the pack of cigarettes to which he’d helped himself.

He also promised to pay for the beers.

It was his choice of beverage, though, that prompted store managers Anthony and Gigi McCray to agree with police that this had not been the most astute of intruders. With refrigerators full of ice-cold imported beer and shelves of expensive liquors, Laughton had picked the two warm Coors off a display rack.

“If the police were coming for me, I would have gone straight for the hard alcohol,” Anthony McCray said. “No beer. I would have dealt with the hangover later.”

The McCrays did find one point in Laughton’s favor--he was not the first burglar to find the store a trap of sorts.

Three months ago, another man broke in through the same vent and shinnied down a rope.

A passerby spotted him inside, however, and he was unable to climb back out before police arrived to arrest him.

On Sunday afternoon, Gigi McCray got rid of the ladder that might have made life easier for either burglar.

But even with it, they noted, Laughton would have escaped only with what little snacks and booze he could carry.

All the money was locked in a hidden safe.