Amazingly the bandits performed the whole heist without setting off alarms or being caught on tape.
On top of the building, they used a saw to cut through several inches of rubber and insulation, then sliced a 3-foot-wide square in the metal roof.
Once inside, the burglars dropped 16 feet to 10-foot-tall racks — avoiding contact with the floor, where motion sensors would have set off an alarm. They snatched the notebooks from the racks, then went back out through the roof.
Avoiding store security cameras by choosing a spot where the cameras were obscured by advertising banners, the thieves managed to grab $26,000 in laptop computers and departed down a 3-inch gas pipe that runs from the roof to the ground outside the store.
"High level of sophistication," said Detective James Ryan, a police department spokesman. "They never set off any motion sensors. They never touched the floor. They rappelled in and rappelled out."
Employees discovered the missing laptops when they arrived to work this morning.
