An interrupted burglary at the Thames Workingman’s Club in the early hours of August 6 saw the thieves abandon a safe in the street during their hasty getaway.
Around 2am, club president Bruce Harper received an alert on his phone from the club’s alarm system. Cameras inside the building showed a single intruder.
“[I] said to the security camera people, ‘ring the police’, and then I came down, and I interrupted them,” Bruce said.
“Luckily I just live around the corner and was able to get here and stop them from stealing the safe. Didn’t know it at the time.”
Bruce said the burglars had parked in the Thames Museum carpark across the road. Only one of them broke in, he said; they appeared to have jimmied open an upstairs window.
“I reckon there was three guys here, I think they would have been in their twenties,” Bruce said.
“But it was dark, and they were dressed dark. And then probably an hour later, a couple of guys came wandering up the street, two of them on pushbikes, reckoned they were looking for their dog. Who looks for a dog at 2 o’clock in the morning? But [the burglars] dropped their cell phone, and I’m wondering if they’d come back looking for the cell phone, but I was standing right beside it.”
The thief made away with between $1000 and $2000 in $2 coins. The large cube-shaped safe they carried out was abandoned on top of a wheelie bin in nearby Martha St.
“You can see the guy stuffing his pocket with these bags of coins,” Bruce said.
“The safe’s wrecked, but they never got into it then. Now we can’t get into it but it’s still got $1,000 in it,” Bruce said.
“They probably did a couple of grand’s worth of damage. They’ve damaged the doors, the walls, where it was attached.”
The data tool on police.govt.nz shows there have been 308 reports of theft and burglary in Thames township so far this year, compared to 322 reports over the same period in 2023.
A police spokesperson confirmed they are investigating the burglary, which occurred at around 1.55am on August 6. They asked anyone with information to get in touch via 105 and quote file number 240806/9041.
