Power-sawing thieves ravage 3 stores at Bluffton’s Tanger Outlets. Estimated $1M loss
Using power saws to burrow into multiple businesses, a group of thieves made off with a fortune’s worth of sunglasses after a midnight burglary last weekend at Bluffton’s Tanger Outlets 2. Employees estimated the stolen merchandise represented about $1 million in losses on top of the thousands of dollars in property damage across three different shops.
No arrests had been made as of Thursday, according to the Beaufort County Sheriff’s Office. Department spokesperson Master Sgt. Danny Allen said investigators believed multiple suspects were involved but could not specify a number.
Beaufort County deputies arrived at the Tanger Outlets 2 shopping mall around 10 a.m. Saturday, meeting with an employee at the Salty Dog T-Shirt Factory who showed them to the store. The front door lock had been “completely removed” by the thieves, according to Tim Stearns, chief operating officer of the Salty Dog company.
At least one of the cash registers inside had been “pried open,” although no money was inside the cash drawer prior to the break-in, according to a sheriff’s office incident report. Police noted a number of holes in the store’s changing room walls that were likely made by a power saw: One was a “square cut” that didn’t make it through the second layer of the wall. Another human-sized hole led into the neighboring Sunglass Hut.
Investigators said the saws also punctured a water line between the stores and caused leaking.
Surveillance video from inside the Salty Dog T-Shirt Factory (left) shows a suspected burglar behind the counter of the store at the Tanger 2 Outlets west of Hilton Head Island shortly after midnight Jan. 11, 2025. Beaufort County investigators say the thieves used power saws to cut holes into neighboring shops, ravaging the T-shirt shop’s dressing room walls in the process (right).
Moving over to Sunglass Hut, an officer noted “almost every display item was no longer there.” The entire security system was “cut and taken” and all the phone lines inside the location had been severed, the report says.
A store manager told deputies that “approximately 1,600 pairs of sunglasses were stolen, totaling an estimated $1 million dollars.” That would put each pair at around $650, aligning with the store’s online prices of high-end eyewear brands like Gucci and Balenciaga.
As of Wednesday afternoon, signage on the front door of the Sunglass Hut said the store was temporarily closed “while we remerchandise our store.” An employee at the location Wednesday declined to comment on the incident.
An employee at the nearby Claire’s later told police she had found a hole in the backroom of the store, which came from the rear section of the Salty Dog. The cash register at Claire’s had also been forcibly opened, but no money was inside prior to the break-in, according to the incident report.
A deputy noted there were “multiple thousands of dollars’ worth of damage in the walls, paint, and electronics of each store.”
A sign on the front door of the Sunglass Hut in the Bluffton-area Tanger Outlets 2 said the location was temporarily closed “while we remerchandise our store” and that the shop would “reopen shortly.” Beaufort County police say a group of thieves stole nearly all of the store’s inventory during a Jan. 11, 2024 break-in, totaling about 1,600 pairs of sunglasses.
The outlets’ exterior had no surveillance cameras, but footage from inside the Salty Dog store showed one unidentifiable suspect behind the counter just after midnight Saturday, wearing a hoodie and backpack.
Estimated losses and property damage costs from the weekend incident exceeded those of a similar large-scale burglary last summer, when thieves sawed holes in the roof of the Best Buy store in Bluffton to nab “tens of thousands of dollars” worth of electronics. The suspects were not apprehended.
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