A couple of months back we blogged about an amazing sleight-of-hand jewelry store theft in Philadelphia in March of a $47,000 engagement ring.  The theft was discovered and the perpetrator caught because of sharp, clear video surveillance footage from a recently-installed exacqVision system and IQeye megapixel IP cameras.

The November issue of Security Products magazine has devoted a rather in-depth look at the theft. Sherleen Mahoney, associate editor for the magazine, starts out:

Love often drives people to do some crazy things. One man, Larry J. Hopkins, tried to steal his way into a woman’s heart. On March 14, he entered Carroll’s Jewelers in Doylestown, Penn. After more than two hours of looking at various engagement rings (i.e., waiting for the right moment), he palmed a $47,000 three-carat diamond solitaire ring in a platinum setting, one of the most expensive rings in the store, when the salesperson’s back was turned. Within two minutes, he was gone—and the salesperson didn’t realize the theft until a few minutes later.

We previously posted the frame-by-frame, digitally zoomed-in images of the actual theft here.  Ms. Mahoney continues on:

In a lucky twist of fate, a few months prior to the incident, Access Security Corp. of Warminster, Penn., a provider of integrated security systems, had upgraded the jewelry store’s legacy CCTV system, which consisted of a 10-year-old time-lapse VCR system linked to four analog cameras. The system had been replaced with an Exacq Technologies hybrid NVR and two megapixel cameras from IQinVision.

Dan Cogan, president of Access Security, was called in to bring the surveillance system up-to-date with the latest IP cameras.  The store also wanted to continue to use their analog cameras:

“Using existing infrastructure was important to the client,” Cogan said. “The exacqVision hybrid NVR system was chosen because it allowed us to integrate the existing analog cameras with the new high-resolution megapixel cameras from IQinVision.”

After realizing the theft had occurred, retrieving the video evidence and exporting it for law enforcement was easy:

A powerful feature of exacqVision is exacqReplay, which provides instant playback of video from any camera simply by right-clicking in that camera’s window panel and selecting the desired time segment, up to the last 15 minutes. This is a useful tool to assess alarms, as well as to quickly review something that just happened. The video or individual images can be easily exported for e-mailing, printing or burning to a CD or DVD.

It was the IQeye 753 that provided the critical surveillance video that led to Hopkins’ arrest. The video clearly shows a white man in his 50s with salt-and-pepper hair, wearing a navy baseball cap with a tan trim, a black leather jacket, blue jeans, a polo shirt and wireless glasses, holding the ring and quickly covering it with his fingers. Access Security exported approximately 10 minutes of video and still images to a CD for the police and media.

The thief, Larry Hopkins, was caught in two days, and was sentenced to up to 23 months in the county jail.  And he did it all for love:

According to a local newspaper, when the prosecutor asked Hopkins why he did it, Hopkins answered, “For love. I loved her so much that I went out of my mind.”

- The complete Security Products story is here.
- The original blog post with frame-by-frame images of the theft is here.

The original, high-resolution video clip is available to all exacqVision resellers.  It makes for an amazing demo of the capabilities of the product.  If you do not already have this clip, contact us here.