Jewelry store owner hopes releasing video will help catch a thief

By Andy Nguyen

Dec. 2, 2016 3:22 PM PT

A La Crescenta jewelry store owner has released security footage of a burglary that occurred at his business in early November, and said he’s frustrated with the lack of progress with the investigation into the crime.

Ishkhan Poghosyan, owner of Pogani Jewelry, said he decided to release footage of the Nov. 3 burglary after a month went by without any progress by the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department investigating the incident.

-------------------

FOR THE RECORD

An earlier version of this post stated that the burglary occured Nov. 2. It occurred Nov. 3.

-------------------

“It’s past a month, and they didn’t catch the guy yet,” Poghosyan said. “Maybe this way, somebody knows the guy and we can catch him.”

The footage shows the man breaking into the store, located at 3115 Foothill Blvd., at around 2 a.m. by climbing through a hole he had cut into a wall the business shares with an adjacent vacant storefront.

Poghosyan said the man stole over $80,000 in merchandise from two display cases. He also said the store’s alarm didn’t go off initially.

“He goes in, cut the wall, come into the store, open the cases and grabbed whatever was in them and gone when the alarm went on,” he said. “The alarm went on late, I don’t know why.”

The sheriff’s department was initially unaware that the store’s owner had released the footage.

Detective Roger Burt from the department’s Crescenta Valley station said they didn’t want to release the footage because it’s still an active investigation. Releasing it prematurely would make the investigation more difficult, he said.

“We were trying to identify this person by other means,” Burt said. “If you release a video to the public and the suspect sees it, then they’ll know you’re onto them and get rid of the jewelry.”

He added that the image quality isn’t that good.

Regardless of the video’s release, the detective said he welcomes anybody who is able to identify the suspect.

Andy Nguyen, andy.nguyen@latimes.com

Twitter: @Andy_Truc