Cigarettes Stolen For A Second Time

For the second time in three days, thieves have targeted a north Sacramento convenience store for its cigarettes.

Sanjesh Prasad and his wife Kamal Kaur own Sahil’s Indian and Island Goods on Marysville Boulevard.

When Prasad went to open the store at 9 a.m. Monday, he found the front door smashed. He walked straight back to the cigarettes to find they were all stolen, however they were the only items taken from the store.
The reason Prasad went right to the cigarettes is because those same items were stolen three days ago; along with some others.

“(The thieves) took the phone cards, $1,000 worth of phone cards,” said Kaur, “They took the Winston cigarettes and the money.”

For the most recent incident, the thieves got in by smashing the front door, but the first time around, on Friday, they broke one of the store’s front windows.

The couple spent the weekend restocking the supply only to have it stolen again.

According to Prasad, they’ve gone eight years in the neighborhood without any significant crime and because of that don’t have any surveillance cameras.

Prasad speculates the reason for the change is that they opened a smoke shop in the store three weeks ago.

Kaur added the recent opening means there are another set of problems. “We don’t have any insurance on it yet,” she said about the shop or its product, “So we are paying everything out of pocket.”

The couple estimates it will cost another 5-thousand dollars to replace the stolen cigarettes, but Prasad said they’ll do it. “We won’t give up, that’s the main thing,” he said. “We’ll stock it up again tonight. We’ll see what happens.”