Police still investigating Pancakes on Plaza vendor booth thefts

Agency spokesman had said case closed; surveillance cameras may hold clues

A spokesman with the Santa Fe Police Department on Tuesday said officers are investigating the burglaries of at least six vendor tents set up on the downtown Plaza late July 3 or early July 4, before the annual Pancakes on the Plaza community celebration.

This comes a day after the spokesman, Greg Gurulé, said the case was essentially closed because officers didn’t have any leads to follow.

“There’s really not much to investigate. Nobody saw anybody; nobody saw anything,” Gurulé told The New Mexican on Monday, after the police department released reports saying more than $20,000 worth of artwork and jewelry had been stolen from half a dozen tents ahead of the Fourth of July breakfast fundraiser for the Rotary Club of Santa Fe.

On Tuesday, Gurulé said the case remains open. Officers haven’t found any witnesses, he said, but they are aware of surveillance cameras that may have recorded the burglaries, and police are pursuing the video.

It’s unclear what other leads police are following in the case because Gurulé didn’t respond to requests from

The New Mexican to speak to the commander overseeing the investigation or the patrol officers who took the initial reports.

“The cases are still open and under investigation and as a result will not comment beyond that,” Gurulé said in an email.

Bruce Adams, the publisher of the Santa Fean Magazine, which operates a web camera on the Santa Fe Arcade on East San Francisco Street, said as far as he knew, police hadn’t tried to contact him to request video from around the time the burglaries occurred.

But, he said, he would be willing to help police get the recordings. “I’d be eager to,” he said. EarthCam, a private company, holds the recordings, Adams said, but he can request copies of them.

Adams said he recently told Police Chief Patrick Gallagher about the camera during a meeting between downtown patrol officers and Plaza merchants.

The highest-dollar item pilfered was a box containing 415 bracelets made by an artist who estimated their collective worth to be $20,000. Additional goods taken from other vendors were estimated to be worth almost $3,000, according to police reports.

In their incident reports, officers said by the time they arrived on the Plaza, the vendor tents were open for the day’s festivities, and some were filled with people browsing artwork.

These disturbances, the officers wrote, made the crime scenes difficult to assess for evidence.

Gurulé had said that pedicab operators were hired to watch the area overnight, but Bob Chavez, who owns Santa Fe Pedicabs, said Monday his company was not involved with providing security.

He and a friend were hired to keep an eye out on the Plaza, Chavez said, separately from the business.

Chavez said he told the police that he did not notice anything suspicious on the Plaza the night before the event.

Organizers have contracted him for the job for at least six years, he told The New Mexican. It’s unclear why Gurulé named the pedicab company, instead, as the security provider.

Some of the artists whose tents had been burglarized were furious at event organizers, saying they were told to set up their booths the night before because they were not going to have time for setup in the morning, and that they had been led to believe there would be private security officers on the Plaza overnight to guard the tents.

Several artists, including the woman who lost $20,000 worth of jewelry, said the application for booth space said overnight security would be provided.

A police officer returned her phone messages this week, telling her a commander will assign her case to a detective, who will contact her for more information, the woman said.

Still, she said, she suspects it may be too late to recover her jewelry. “It’s been more than a week already.”

Police are aware of surveillance cameras that may have recorded the burglaries.