In the quiet little Washington State town of Puyallup there is everything you would expect to find in a small Pacific Northwest town. People are friendly and the shops are local. It is surrounded by trees and farms. You wouldn’t expect a jewelry heist that sounds straight out of a movie to happen but for the owners of Gold Definitions it did. Most jewelry safes are high security safes that will protect a high dollar amount of jewelry. A TRTL-30x6 is the only safe with a security rating high enough to hold up to a million dollars in valuables. Make no mistake; these safes are very heavy duty. They are not for a typical family looking to secure money or firearms. The security features are so tough that not even specialized tools would do the job. In Puyallup when the owners of Gold Definitions went to work on Monday morning they were surprised to be faced with an empty safe. A team of thieves’ descended through the roof of the building next door and figured out exactly where the safe was, cut a hole through the wall and cut a hole through the back of the safe.
To cut a hole in the safe they would have had to cut through inches of solid steel, rebar, concrete and not to mention the building wall itself. The reinforcements in the safe body are designed to thwart cutting tools commonly used on metal and hard materials. The saws they used would have had to use a specialized cooling system to cool the blades down. The blades would needed to be replaced every couple of hours or so to insure continued cutting. This means that they would have had to have several un disturbed hours of cutting in order to cut a hole large enough to fit their arms through to grab the jewelry. Aside from cutting through the reinforced safe, the main accomplishment is that they did not set off any alarms and had undisturbed time to perform the cutting required. They spent about 4-6 hours cutting through the safe. This heist was not pulled off by one person. A group of highly trained professionals with tools you cannot just buy at Home Depot put a plan into action and it paid off for them.
The sophistication of this heist would lead anyone to believe that they had done their homework. They must have done some pre planning that led up to the actual heist. A surveillance camera captured only a glimpse of shadowy figures and a truck and that’s all the police have to go on at this point. The thieves got away with well over a million dollars in jewelry. The likelihood of this happening to jewelry stores is less than 1 in a million. You can rest assured that a high security safe will protect your valuables but this heist should be a lesson that not everything is guaranteed.
