Jensen La Vende

Po­lice be­lieve that there are ar­son­ists de­lib­er­ate­ly tar­get­ing gro­ceries so that they can loot af­ter the Fire Ser­vice put out such blazes, fol­low­ing two fires in the North East­ern Di­vi­sion in the past four weeks.

The most re­cent in­ci­dent took place yes­ter­day morn­ing.

Ac­cord­ing to fire of­fi­cials, they had to res­cue a fam­i­ly of eight who lived above the Ben­e­fit The Peo­ple Su­per­mar­ket along the East­ern Main Road, Barataria, af­ter they be­came trapped when a fire start­ed in the build­ing around 2 am.

By the time the blaze was put un­der con­trol an es­ti­mat­ed $12 mil­lion in dam­age was done to the goods alone. A cost to the struc­tur­al dam­age had not been as­sessed up to yes­ter­day.

By 7 am, how­ev­er, peo­ple from all over flocked to the scene and be­gan tot­ing off shop­ping carts filled with goods, in­clud­ing di­a­pers, al­co­hol and gro­ceries.

By 9 am, po­lice at­tached to the North East­ern Di­vi­sion Task Force had the area se­cured and the loot­ing sub­sided. But this did not de­ter po­ten­tial loot­ers from lurk­ing around.

Po­lice said sev­er­al peo­ple were searched and found to have knap­sacks, mar­ket bags and oth­er bags stacked in­side each oth­er, pre­sum­ably to be used to pil­fer items from the gro­cery.

Po­lice said no one was ar­rest­ed and they spoke to the own­ers, who were in­formed the po­lice pres­ence was on­ly tem­po­rary and that they need­ed to hire se­cu­ri­ty to se­cure their prop­er­ty.

While po­lice were at the scene, how­ev­er, the own­ers tried to weld holes the loot­ers were us­ing to steal the goods.

Last Sat­ur­day, a sim­i­lar in­ci­dent took place at the burnt out D&J Bud­get Mart at Priz­gar Road, San Juan. Po­lice said the fire took place on No­vem­ber 21 but the own­er had hired Heller Se­cu­ri­ty to pro­tect his be­long­ings.

On De­cem­ber 9 the se­cu­ri­ty de­tail was re­moved and the fol­low­ing day loot­ers cart­ed off every­thing they could be­fore the po­lice ar­rived to pro­tect the whole­sale busi­ness.

The loot­ing last Sat­ur­day was al­so cap­tured and shared on so­cial me­dia. The es­ti­mat­ed dam­age for the whole­sale busi­ness was $12 mil­lion.

Po­lice have since de­duced that there may be a gang of "hun­gry ban­dits" tar­get­ing places so they can loot from them fol­low­ing a fire, since most of the goods might be in­sured or con­sid­ered dam­aged and use­less to the own­ers.

Po­lice are al­so warn­ing peo­ple about pur­chas­ing ed­i­ble items from un­scrupu­lous busi­ness­men who will sell dam­aged goods at a re­duced price.