Bethel shoe store owner to thieves of rare Freddy Kreuger sneakers: ‘Bring me my shoes back’

BETHEL — A local business owner is asking for the thieves he said took two prized pairs of ultra-rare sneakers to return the shoes to him untouched.

Colin Hoffman said thieves took 11 pairs of sneakers last Thursday, but the ones he really cares about are two pairs of Nike Dunk SB Low Freddy Kruegers. Combined, he says he spent around $50,000 on those shoes alone — $23,000 on one pair, and $27,000 on another.

The real worth of the shoes is higher, he said, because of price increases.

“I just want to tell the people out there that did this: Bring me my shoes back,” Hoffman said, speaking to media inside A.shoe.affair, his store on Greenwood Avenue in downtown Bethel.

Police have said they are investigating the incident, but so far have not released any details about the alleged theft.

The shoes feature a red and green stripe pattern that evokes the sweater worn by Freddy

Kreuger in the “Nightmare on Elm Street” movies — along with slasher bloodstains on the shoe’s accents. The design resulted in a cease-and-desist letter from New Line Cinema, according to Hoffman, forcing Nike to destroy the shoes. But a handful survived.

Hoffman said one of the pairs he purchased were “oiled,” meaning workers threw the shoes in a pile and doused them in lighter fluid to burn them — he said the shoes have scorch marks on them – but were somehow taken out of the pile and saved. The others were brand new sneakers with a “salesman sample” with a sticker on them.

“That shoe was basically the rarest shoe you can find — because it was not in the oil pile, it was not touched,” Hoffman said, standing near where a display case holding the shoes had once been. “Every pair has its own story; it’s a piece of history,” he said. “What they did is they took a piece of history that I brought to our town.”

He said people who came by were able to see a pair of shoes that no one else had, likening them to museum pieces he wanted to one day hand down to his children.

Hoffman said he bought the shoes months ago and had only recently finished paying them off. He opened the business about 13 months ago, fulfilling a dream of opening the kind of shoe store he wanted.

“I sacrificed everything for these shoes, these people have no idea how much I worked to get these things,” he said.