By Carolyn Bick
Northwest Asian Weekly
Brian Myers was on the phone with the police as soon as the car crashed into the front of the Chinatown-International District’s Tabletop Village, a gaming store, on Sept. 18.
Footage of the breakup captured by Tabletop Village’s Ring camera. View the video. (Provided by Brian Myers.)
But by the time the police had arrived, the burglars had already stolen the trading cards — some of which were quite valuable, he said — off the store’s wall and fled.
“The problem was that a lot of those things were gifts or sentimental although they were collectible items and a lot of them were actually resellable,” Myers, the store’s owner, told the Northwest Asian Weekly. “Some of these things are bought and paid for by folks, and we do resell them. So it is part of our inventory, but it was used to make a very pretty display in my office.”
Myers said that he filed a police report, but the damage from the break-in, including the cards’ theft, totaled upwards of $15,000 — and that is not even counting the cost to either replace the door or upgrade to a significantly stronger one. Myers said that the cost to replace the door will be another $4,000–$5,000 and that the cost to get a stronger one will be closer to $10,000.
Myers said that the people who broke into the store had come in a few days prior, likely to case it. He said the person — whom he described as a young man — broke into the store was wearing the exact same thing to break into the store as they wore a few days prior, when they visited the store, allegedly to look around.
Myers also recalled that the young man was accompanied by two other people he described as young women that day, too, but that only the young man appeared on the video cameras, the night of the break-in. The car’s driver never appeared on video the night of the break-in.
Myers’ store is not the only gaming store that has been targeted. On Sept. 10, someone broke into Mox Boarding House in Ballard.
Myers said that he wishes the CID had Donnie Chin back. Chin, the executive director of the International District Emergency Center (IDEC), was a local CID superhero of sorts, Myers said. In the 1970s and 1980s, Chin organized and led a cohort of young folks — Donnie’s Kids — who acted as the area’s first responders. But in 2015, he was murdered. His murder remains unsolved.
“We really need a — I don’t know — Seattle [or] Chinatown kind of a superhero who patrols our streets and makes criminals afraid of breaking into anywhere in Chinatown,” Myers said. “I feel like if people just knew that there was a patrol person who lived in and around Chinatown … I highly doubt they would do it. … I’m willing to help pay for that for all of Chinatown. Because we’re not separate from the neighbors that we live with.”
Carolyn can be reached at newstips@nwasianweekly.com.