A kosher ice cream shop in the Westwood neighborhood of Los Angeles was vandalized on New Year’s Day, according to the Jewish Journal.
The Carvel Westwood ice cream shop, which sells the company’s KOF-K kosher-certified ice cream, had five out of its seven windows shattered beyond repair. Its cash register, containing around $200, was also stolen.
According to store owner Stephen Winick, the incident occurred between 2 a.m. and 6 a.m. on January 1. No security footage exists of the crime due to the landlord removing the building’s security cameras when the building changed management, according to Winick.
“Cameras do prevent theft,” Winick told the Journal. “[They] should be mandatory to protect property. [Even] if you have cameras that are visible [but] don’t perform any function, you’re giving someone a false sense of security — so they need to be working.”
“At the end of the day, whether I lose one window or five windows, it’s still a disaster,” Winick told Fox11. “I’m still unprotected.”
He said that the incident was the third time that his ice cream store has been broken into and vandalized since 2005.
Winick, who launched a fundraising drive to pay for $5,000 toward the cost of new windows wrote on his GoFundMe page that he was “just trying to move forward.”
“[This is the] worst time of the year for an ice cream store,” he said.