DENVER (KDVR) — Early Monday morning, a Denver restaurant was broken into and robbed.
Ryan Oakes owns The Brutal Poodle, a punk rock and heavy metal-inspired gastropub. Oakes said it was just another Monday when his business partner went to open up for the day.
“My business partner had opened up like he does normal Mondays and walked through the front door, and the back door was actually propped open, so he was just curious if maybe we had a bogus close last night,” Oakes said.
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It was then he noticed something was off.
“He saw the register had been violated, and basically, everything was just on the floor there,” Oakes said.
Oakes said there was not much in the register, but the safe in their office was a different story.
“They broke into our safe, and they wiped us out pretty much entirely,” he said.
They stole roughly $7,000 in cash and several credit cards, which were being kept safe for customers who had left them behind.
They checked the cameras, which painted a picture of exactly what happened.
“A couple pulled up in the alley and they parked on a motorcycle and, like a crotch rocket. They jumped the fence, used a crowbar to break into the back door,” Oakes said.
Theft at The Brutal Poodle caught on camera
Once inside, security cameras captured the suspect walking around the restaurant. He is shown wearing a ski mask and leather chaps. Once he breaks into the register and the office, he is caught on video hopping the fence and exchanging words with the person on the motorcycle before the two speed away.
Timestamps show it happening around 4 a.m. Since then, Oakes said the community has rallied around him and The Brutal Poodle.
“It’s definitely cool. So cool. It’s not something we’ve ever asked for something like this. We’re never going to. We’re always ones to give,” Oakes said.
A friend of his, Rob Denver, set up a GoFundMe to help cover the loss.
“I called him and asked him if he’d be OK with me setting up a GoFundMe,” Denver said. “And, of course, you know, he’s not the quickest to accept help. And I told him it’s going to happen one way or another. So I said I can either block you from all the posts so you don’t see it, or I can just go ahead and do it.”
Within just a couple of hours, they were more than halfway to their goal.
“I told them … you know, you’re just beloved by the community and everything they’re doing, clearly, people have responded, which is incredible,” Denver said.
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In the meantime, Oakes said they will still be there for their customers.
“We don’t know how to really recover from this or approach this. So yeah, just working on the day-to-day, we’ll just — we’ll figure it out, man. We always do. We’ll figure it out,” Oakes said.
Oakes said he is asking those who think they may have left their credit card at his restaurant in the past three weeks to make sure they cancel their cards in case they were compromised.
This is still an active investigation. Anyone with information is asked to contact the Denver Police Department.
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