Same store, different day: Smash-and-grab thieves hit St. Louis beauty supply store again [St. Louis Post-Dispatch]

Oct. 31--ST. LOUIS -- Peaches Burks, manager of Forever Young Beauty Supply, said her store might have to move from its location in Tower Grove South after smash-and-grab thieves targeted the business early Thursday -- for the second time in about a month.

"Oh no, not again," Burks said after learning that thieves drove a van through the storefront just before 4 a.m. today. They grabbed pricey human hair extensions and other merchandise and fled. "This can't keep happening."

"We're going to end up having to move out of south St. Louis" if thieves keep targeting her store, she said. "Our insurance rates are going to keep going up."

Burks' store is at 3671 South Grand Boulevard, across from the International Institute. In today's theft, Burks was still taking inventory but said perhaps tens of thousands of dollars worth of hair extensions were gone. It's a repeat of what happened at her store on Sept. 27.

"They knew what they were going for," she said.

Also this morning, a burglary was reported at Nu Fashion Beauty Products, 4214 South Broadway. Thieves backed a stolen vehicle into the front window and stole packs of hair extensions at 4:34 a.m., said the store's owner, who asked that his name not be used. He said he knows why hair extensions are targeted.

"It's so expensive and probably easy to grab," he said. He plans to look into adding concrete barriers in front of Nu Fashion to prevent future smash-and-grabs.

Police are investigating if the two burglaries this morning are connected.

On Monday morning, thieves used a Jeep to ram Kings Beauty Supply at 4600 Chippewa Avenue and steal thousands of dollars worth of hair extensions.

In the previous smash-and-grab at Forever Young, someone backed a pickup into the store at about 5 a.m. on Sept. 27. A surveillance camera taped two men and a third person, possibly a woman, jump out and take merchandise, then drive away. No arrests were made in that crime.

For that crime, Burks said the store lost $27,000 worth of hair extensions -- either because the thieves took them or glass that shattered from the break-in ended up in other hair products, and they had to be thrown out. The store had to spend nearly $18,000 more to make repairs to the wall and other areas of the store and clean up the mess.

Several bags of hair extensions were taken. The packets can cost $100 to $250 each.

Burks said she had asked the owner to install concrete barriers outside the storefront of Forever Young. She was told they'd need 27 concrete posts to protect the entire length of the storefront. "Maybe he'll do it now," she said.

Beauty-supply store operators, including Burks, the Nu Fashion owner and Sam Eid, whose north St. Louis County beauty supply store had hair extensions swiped in June, say the hair extensions made of real human hair are a hot commodity. The product has been a big hit with thieves at some beauty salons here and across the country. At one salon in Dearborn, Mich., in 2011, a shop owner was killed during the theft of 80 hair extensions worth about $10,000. A woman in Jacksonville, Fla., last year stole eight packages of hair at knifepoint.

The theft of hair extensions is a trend police started spotting a few years ago in some big U.S. cities. It's been covered in news stories in Las Vegas, Atlanta, Houston, Miami and elsewhere. It began making news in the St. Louis area over the summer, as hair was being targeted as often as flat-screen TVs.

Women of all races wear hair extensions, inspired by celebrities like Selena Gomez, Christina Aguilara, Beyonce and Jessica Simpson, who has her own line of hair extensions and wigs. Neal Lester, an English professor at Arizona State University who has studied African-American culture, said hair can be particularly wrapped up in identity in black culture. He said black women and their male partners are spending big money on these products.

"For better or for worse, there's something about having your hair be top-notch that gives you a better attitude," Lester said. "Hair really is more important than people acknowledge."

Anything expensive and portable can attract the eye of thieves. And hair extensions, as opposed to electronics, don't have associated codes or serial numbers and can't be traced, Lester said. Plus, while people don't need a new TV every six or 12 months, they remove the hair weaves or extensions and replace them with new ones.

Lester said he thinks part of the crime trend began about the time of comedian Chris Rock's 2009 documentary "Good Hair." Part of it featured celebrities in Los Angeles talking about hair, as well as women in Harlem spending hours at beauty parlors getting a weave of hair extensions or putting hair extensions on layaway because they were so expensive.

"I think we're hearing about it now," Lester said of the crime wave "because there was something about that movie that let people know this is really big business."

The Brazilian Remy type is the top of the market, and the ones the thieves are after, Burks said. They are virgin unprocessed hair, which means they come from young girls who haven't used hair dyes or had their hair permed before getting it cut. Because of that, it is softer than other brands and falls back naturally into place when the wind blows, she said. It takes two to three packs for the average woman who wants long hair extensions, Burks said.

In the St. Louis area, the thefts are usually done in the predawn hours by smash-and-grab thieves. Thieves use tools as small as bricks or as large as stolen pickup trucks to smash windows or walls before a store opens for the day. They then quickly grab loot and get away. During the summer in the St. Louis metro area, rarely a week went by that a business wasn't hit by such thieves taking electronics, liquor or cigarettes. Several of those businesses were beauty supply stores.

An exasperated Burks this morning said, "I just don't understand it, that this keeps happening." She said she doesn't know where the extensions are being sold because she doesn't see people selling them on the street.

However, police nationwide who have investigated the crime trend say what typically happens is that the stolen hair is sold over the Internet. On eBay, for example, one vendor was selling a single set consisting of seven pieces of 26-inch long hair for nearly $100. Another seller's pitch: "Want long hair but don't want to wait to let it grow ... we've got what you need."

St. Louis police were at Forever Young, reviewing the surveillance video from today's burglary. The tape shows a white or light-colored van pull onto the parking lot, back up, pull forward, straighten out and then speed backward, slamming into the store's glass front wall. The surveillance camera inside the store shows two people run inside: one opens a plastic bag while the other makes a beeline for the side wall where the Remy hair extensions are on display. They pass up the cash register and other brands of hair extensions.

Burks thinks the people involved might be the same thieves who did this in September. If her store can't get concrete barriers soon, employees say they might stop carrying the most-expensive products.

At Nu Fashion, the vehicle used in the break-in had been stolen. It was left behind when the thieves made off in a second vehicle. The owner of the vehicle that had been stolen showed up at the scene after being contacted by police and was talking to officers. The vehicle owner found a driver's license that had fallen on the floorboard of her vehicle and handed it over to police, thinking one of the thieves had left behind a major clue.

Sam Eid, the owner of Kay Beauty Supply at 8624 Natural Bridge Avenue, said no arrests have been made since thieves stole about $8,300 worth of hair extensions from his shop at about 4:30 a.m. on June 25. It's been too expensive to install concrete posts outside his store, but he says he won't stop selling the pricey extensions.

"That's what's really selling," he said. "If you stop selling those, you may as well close your store."

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