EAST POINT, Ga. — A woman's car was broken into and her gun was stolen, all while she ate dinner with a friend. She told Channel 2 Action News that she wasn't alone in her experience.
The incident happened at a LongHorn Steakhouse along Camp Creek Parkway in the Camp Creek Marketplace shopping center.
The restaurant told Channel 2's Christian Jennings it has a private security guard but would not say whether that security guard was in the parking lot when the break-ins happened.
Now, the woman whose car was broke into is warning others.
“We’re eating dinner and the waiter comes and says, 'Where did y’all park? Because they’re hitting cars out here,'” Sharice Graham said.
She told Jennings that she didn’t realize what the waiter meant until she walked outside.
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“I saw a group of people standing by a car with glass on the ground,” Graham said.
At first, Graham thought her car had been spared. She was wrong. A thief had popped her lock to get inside. And the one thing missing from her center console was her gun.
“My doors were locked, gun was not in sight. I just went to go get something to eat and normally I wouldn’t keep my gun in my car, but I was just going to get something to eat for an hour, hour and a half,” Graham said.
She told Jennings that she talked to five other people in the restaurant’s parking lot that night whose cars were broken into, although East Point police say they only have three reports.
LongHorn released a statement to Jennings, saying:
“This is an issue affecting multiple businesses in the area. The East Point Police Department has been involved, and we are working with them to resolve this issue. Private security is also in place around the restaurant.”
Earlier this year, two women were carjacked on two different occasions at the Camp Creek Marketplace.
The first carjacking happened in January outside a Lowe's Home Improvement store. In that case, a woman was pistol-whipped.
Then in April, a woman's car was stolen at the BJ's Wholesale Club gas station.
“I don’t even want to go over on that side of town anymore to eat,” Graham said.
Part of Camp Creek Marketplace falls under Atlanta police jurisdiction. East Point police handle the rest.
East Point police said they've assigned extra officers to patrol the area over the past couple of months.
Cox Media Group
