A man broke in and stole from Chapel West Wine & Liquors Thursday morning, according to the shop’s co-owner Shital Patel.
At 4 a.m., the man used a brick to shatter the store’s front door. He then entered and took between 10 and 15 bottles of wine, Patel said. Though no one was working at the liquor shop during the break-in, Patel said the burglar triggered an alarm and police arrived moments later. The stolen products were valued at $200, and the shop was forced to replace the door’s glass immediately.
“Thank god no one was in the store,” Patel said. “I didn’t want them to harm anyone.”
The burglary startled some businesses in the surrounding area. One worker at Dunkin’ Donuts said she heard an alarm at 4:00 a.m., and cops came into the coffee shop roughly 15 minutes later to ask questions. But front counter workers at the nearby Chapel Mini Mart, The Study at Yale as well as Jojo’s Coffee and Tea did not know about the burglary.
“Sometimes people will come in and take money from the tip jar, but nothing like this,” the Jojo’s barista working at 8:30 a.m. said after the News informed her about the burglary.
Chapel West Wine & Liquors replaced Gag Jr’s Liquor Shop in August 2015.
Chapel West is lined with signs that notify passersby of surveillance cameras, which in turn are supposed to deter crime. Still, New Haven residents interviewed by the News acknowledged that burglaries are a part of urban life.
Juan Sánchez, who lived in New Haven for six to seven years before moving to a nearby community, said crime is more prominent in areas like Fair Haven.
“Crime happens everywhere,” Mitchell Tan ’18 said, who lives in East Rock.
The Chapel West neighborhood is well lit, so Tan said he feels comfortable walking on the street at night.
He added that his opinion was the general consensus among many of his friends living both on campus and Dwight Street.
Correction, Jan. 27: A previous version of this article and its headline misidentified the entering of and stealing from the liquor store as a robbery. Since force was not used against a person to take the wine, the crime was, in fact, a burglary.