HUDSON HEIGHTS — Talk about bad fortune.
A local Chinese restaurant has been the victim of two thefts over the past few weeks, with hundreds of dollars in cash and a delivery scooter stolen from the eatery, employees and police said.
Yang Garden, at the corner of 187th Street and Pinehurst Avenue, was most recently targeted on June 20, when $500 was swiped from the restaurant's cash register, staff said.
Employee Ryan Yang, whose cousin owns the eatery, said that he and other workers arrived to work that day to find someone had broken in and taken the money set aside for morning deliveries.
Police confirmed that a burglary took place at the site, but did not provide further details because the investigation is still ongoing.
The thief or thieves could have gotten into the restaurant by crawling beneath the restaurant’s security gate, which was pulled up about a foot when Yang arrived that morning, he said. The restaurant’s door behind the gate was not locked, Yang noted.
“It must have been somebody very small,” he explained.
Yang said he was surprised because the area surrounding the restaurant is generally very safe.
“At first I thought maybe some kids were joking with us,” he said of finding the raised gate. “But then my mom saw that everything was taken.”
A few weeks before that, someone stole one of the scooters that employees use to make deliveries while it was parked outside of the restaurant, Yang and police said.
Someone later found the vehicle near 193rd Street and St. Nicholas Avenue, but it was badly damaged when police returned it, he explained.
These were the first such incidents in the seven years the business has been open, Yang said.
The owner is now taking extra security precautions, including the installation of a heavy-duty lock on the outside gate and plan to install security cameras in the coming weeks.
