3 skate shops in Portland out $1000s after reporting similar burglaries

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    PORTLAND, OR (KPTV) — Three different skate shops say they were recently burglarized.

Smart Collective Skate Shop says it was nearly cleared out Thursday night.

Commonwealth Skate Shop and Cal Skate Skateboards also say their windows were broken and thousands of dollars’ worth of merchandise was stolen from them.

Cal Skate Skateboards, in particular, has a difficult hurdle, as they say, they estimate to replace their large shop window was quoted at $4,000.

“The expense of the product was a fraction of what the window cost was,” Chris Nukala, manager at Cal Skate Skateboards, said. “We’re moving forward—but we never want to be a store the like has bars on the wall.”

Ben Firestone, the owner of Smart Collective Skate Shop in southeast Portland, works multiple jobs and runs the small business himself. He says he got the call from his landlord this morning that his store was broken into.

“We were just stocked to the gills for the holiday season that was just starting, we had a really good promotion going for small business Saturday, and we are ready to go for the season, and now we only have a quarter of what we intended on selling,” Firestone said.

Firestone estimates that between five and seven thousand dollars’ worth of items were stolen from his store. He says he did not engage his alarm Thursday night, something he admits was a mistake. He says security camera footage shows the suspects load a vehicle once, drive away, and them come back later to load up again.

Firestone says nearly 75 percent of his store is gone. Anyone with any information about any of these break-ins is asked to call the police.

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