ROGERS PARK — The laid-back vibe of Armadillo's Pillow was jolted earlier this week when a pack of kids snatched the 20-year-old bookstore's house guitar and smashed it at the beach, its owner said.
"A lot worse things could happen, knock on wood," owner Matt Ebert, 48, said this week. ''It still [ticks] me off."
Ebert said he runs the small shop at 6753 N. Sheridan Road with his wife, but on Monday was the only person there when he went to the restroom a little before 8 p.m. When he returned to the front counter, he saw the door to the street was ajar.
The owner from neighboring Flatts & Sharpe Music Co. walked in, asking, "'Are you missing your guitar?'" Ebert recalled.
A quick look in the next room, near the plush chairs and floor-to-ceiling book shelves, confirmed the steel-string Alvarez Regent acoustic was gone, Ebert said.
"I just saw it minutes before," he said. "We had a guitar laying around for open mic, and for people to just rock out, you know? It's our guitar."
Flatts & Sharpe owner Chris Bell said she had been inside her shop when she saw a boy, who appeared to be in his early teens, run down the street with the the guitar raised above his head.
While she wondered what had happened, a woman who had been parking her car around the corner on Columbia Avenue came in and told her she had heard a group of boys bragging about stealing a guitar.
Since she wasn't missing any instruments, she went next door to find Ebert.
Ebert said not only was the guitar missing but his new smartphone as well. So Bell called 911 and Ebert headed down Columbia toward the beach.
By the time he got there, he said, a few police officers had five or six boys face down in the sand and they were going through the kids' backpacks.
The phone was no where to be found, but the guitar, which Ebert said he bought in the 1990s for $300, was "smashed up" in a nearby garbage can.
He said the cops cuffed one of the boys, who apparently admitted to the act, and escorted him off the beach.
Officer Janel Sedevic, a Chicago Police Department spokeswoman, confirmed a theft of a guitar was reported about 7:50 p.m. in the 6700 block of North Sheridan Road. She said several suspects were questioned and their names recorded by officers, but no arrests were made.
"They were goofing around," Ebert said of the kids. "It sucks for me. ... They had some fun, and I'm screwed."
Ebert said it wasn't the first time the shop had been robbed.
A few months ago somebody snatched cash from an unattended till, and his wife's wallet was taken, he said.
But he said he doesn't plan to change the easygoing atmosphere at Armadillo's Pillow.
"I don't think that means we deserve" being robbed, he said. "You don't happen to win the lottery if you find someone's credit card — you know what I mean? Come on, man."
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