THE security system in place at BrakeWell in Pinetown has failed its business owners for the second time in two months, as robbers hit their shop again on Thursday evening.
According to the director of BrakeWell, Alec Cox, their security system in place is less than a year old as it was completely replaced after the business was struck by lightning.
“In the first incident last year on 12 December, the robbers brought their own sledgehammer, entered through the rear of the premises, smashed through the inter leading doors between the workshop and the offices, walked through five beams and triggered no alarms,” said Cox.
He said the main alarm and telephone system was completely destroyed before the group made their way into the upstairs office where they smashed through the glass door to look for valuables. During that incident, R9000 and power tools were stolen.
The latest robbery took place last Thursday evening between 5.45pm. The security system was armed and the shop was locked up for the evening. When a staff member arrived to open the shop at 6.40am, the access door on the rolling door was open and the employee was instructed by Cox not to enter the building as he suspected there was another break-in.
He said the security company sent along a guard, who was present when the main office door was opened. “They keypad was completely dead and I saw that the alarm system was completely smashed into pieces and off the wall. I then noticed the men had gained access through a front window, as they had broken the burglar guard and replaced it again once they had gained access to the building.”
Cox first looked upstairs and found that the robbers had rolled a safe from one of the rooms into the passageway and cut it open with one of his company’s angle grinders. He said there were only documents in the safe. The robbers had also broken into the downstairs office, smashed open the safe with a sledgehammer, found the petty cash box and stole R1500. “I think they were only after cash as there were two cellphones lying on the table, which they left behind. They also unplugged all six of the PCs in case we had a monitoring system, they didn’t take any of those either.
“Since the installation of our new security system they have been able to break into our premises twice and our alarms were somehow disabled during both incidents. The only way that I can think of to help prevent this from happening again is to set up an independent monitoring system along with our current alarm system – as a fail safe,” concluded Cox.
Blue Security’s managing director, Darryn le Grange, responds:
“We don’t deny that it is possible to get around an electronic alarm system if you understand the way an alarm system works. There have been cases where criminals have used this knowledge to get around the alarm system. It is however much more common for the employees of an organisation, to study the layout of the property and the building, the location of the alarm system and the various detection devices and use this information to figure out how to evade detection.
In this case, if there was additional external protection such as outdoor beams the odds are that the burglars would not have got past the alarm.
This is why we always advocate for a layered security system that covers the outside and inside of a property – the more layers that a would-be criminal needs to get through the greater the odds of detection.
In this case the burglars had clearly studied the layout of the building and carefully executed the break-in with precision to ensure the alarm would not be triggered.”
