In a daring Easter Sunday heist, thieves made off with an astonishing sum of up to $30 million from a money storage facility in Sylmar, located in the San Fernando Valley.
According to Cmdr. Elaine Morales of the Los Angeles Police Department, this burglary ranks among the largest in the city’s history, surpassing even the most audacious armored-car heists.
The facility, which remains unnamed, is responsible for handling and storing cash from businesses across the region.
The burglars managed to breach both the building and the safe where the money was kept, leaving law enforcement officials puzzled as to how they circumvented the alarm system.
Sources close to the investigation revealed that the crew gained access to the vault by breaking through the facility’s roof.
TRENDING: Iconic Discount Retail Chain With 370 Stores to File Bankruptcy or Liquidate as Soon as This Week
Remarkably, the safe showed no visible signs of a break-in from the outside.
The operators of the business, whose identities have not been disclosed by the police, only discovered the theft upon opening the vault on Monday.
It was an Easter Sunday heist so bold, bandits got away with up to $30 million without firing a single shot. The target: an L.A. cash storage facility where the heist wasn't even discovered until the next morning. The mystery of the missing millions – Tonight at 11 from ABC7 pic.twitter.com/VyIcCm1ItJ
— ABC7 Eyewitness News (@ABC7) April 4, 2024
LAPD’s Mission Division detectives promptly responded to the scene to collect evidence.
The fact that very few individuals were aware of the substantial sums of cash stored in the safe adds another layer of intrigue to the case.
Law enforcement sources described the break-in as an elaborate operation, suggesting the involvement of an experienced crew of burglars with the knowledge and skills to infiltrate a secure facility undetected.
The FBI and LAPD are currently investigating the theft, as confirmed by an FBI spokeswoman.
This incident comes nearly two years after another high-profile heist in which thieves made off with up to $100 million in jewelry and valuables from a Brink’s tractor-trailer at a Grapevine truck stop.
The crime occurred on July 11, 2022, during a 27-minute window when one driver was asleep in the vehicle’s sleeper berth, and the other was eating at the Flying J truck stop off Interstate 5 in Lebec, California. The perpetrators of that crime remain at large.
The Easter Sunday burglary in Sylmar surpasses the previous record for the largest cash heist in Los Angeles, which was set on September 12, 1997, when $18.9 million was stolen from the former site of the Dunbar Armored facility on Mateo Street.
The individuals responsible for that theft were eventually apprehended.
READ NEXT: Regional Banks at Risk as Almost a Trillion Dollars of Commercial RE Loans Come Due This Year
As the investigation into the Sylmar heist continues, authorities are working diligently to unravel the mystery surrounding this audacious crime and bring those responsible to justice.
