Soap Box burglarized; one suspect still at large

Close to midnight on Saturday, July 3, two men broke into Soap Box laundromat on the east side of Grant.

Gerald Hostetler and his wife Alicia purchased the laundromat and car wash located at 32864 Highway 23 earlier this year, and became the official owners May 17.

Upon purchasing the business, Hostleter replaced the door to the laundromat in an attempt to make the building more secure.

The night of the break-in, Hostetler said they had locked the door and used a deadlock installed with extra long screws.

“I was really shocked that somebody was able to break in there,” he added.

Sergeant Brian Gertsch with the Perkins County Sheriff’s Department, the officer who investigated the break-in, said the first man entered the building, probably to case it out, before unplugging the security camera inside the laundromat.

Before he was able to unplug the camera, however, Hostetler’s motion-sensitive cameras turned on and picked up several images of the perpetrators.

A few minutes after the camera was unplugged, the door to the office was pried open and the camera in that room was unplugged as well. It was then the two men began to collect keys and open up the machines in the facility.

They proceeded to remove the coin hopper for the bill exchange machine, as well as the coins from each of the boxes in the washers and dryers.

Gertsch also noted they took the keys to the outside car wash coin machines and stole the change from those machines as well.

The morning of July 4, Hostetler got a phone call from a customer saying their bill exchanger wasn’t working, and after arriving at Soap Box, he found his new business had been burglarized.

He had to replace the door to the laundromat that same day, and had to re-key everything. Hostetler also had to purchase new coin hoppers for the bill machine and the car wash coin boxes.

“I know the bill exchanger had $200 in it,” Hostetler said. “The rest of it is kind of an estimation as we had just collected money from the machines a few days prior.”

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