[1]Courtesy photo by Centralia Police Department
Updated at 3:31 p.m.
By Sharyn L. Decker
Lewis County Sirens news reporter
One shot was fired when a masked man was discovered inside Salewsky’s Jewelry shop in downtown Centralia this morning.
Police are looking for two cars that fled the scene heading north.
Officers called about 7 a.m. don’t know if the intruder was injured, according to the Centralia Police Department.
Police say a relative of the owner was asleep upstairs and confronted a subject who was attempting to steal jewelry from a showcase, ordering the intruder to stop and firing one round.
The intruder escaped by crawling through an opening cut into the wall from an empty neighboring business, according to police.
Two males were seen running from the area, both wearing ski-type masks, according to police.
Salewsky’s is on the 200 block of North Tower Avenue.
It’s not known yet if anything was actually taken from the business, according to Sgt. Stacy Denham. Detectives are at the scene this morning, he said. Inventory is being taken, but it seems as though the burglars had just begun, and dropped some or much of the loot, according to police.
It occurred about 6:30 a.m. The man who lives upstairs and awoke to noises called the owner first, who responded to the shop and then police were notified, according to Denham.
The two males ran to a parking lot east of the store about a block away and got into two cars, each of which had a female driver waiting, according to police.
A passerby smoking a cigarette as he waited for a ride thought it was odd because both were wearing ski masks, according to police.
The cars are described as: possibly a red newer model Mercedes CLK with no front license plate but a rear plate in which some of the figures were something like AK77, according to police.
The other vehicle was possibly a silver newer Toyota Scion FRS, two-door coupe – or a Subaru BRZ – with no license plates visible. Both cars had tinted windows, according to the witness.
Police are asking anyone who sees the vehicles to call 911 and report their location.
Denham said the burglars got into Salewsky’s by somehow entering a vacant adjacent business to the north and breaking through the wall that separates the two businesses. A hole cut in the sheetrock with unknown tools was just large enough for a small person to crawl through, he said.
The intruder who was confronted was wearing a blue hooded sweatshirt and a dark stocking mask, police said. Police don’t know if the bullet hit him.
The relative who fired the gun was not injured, according to police.
One of the subjects whose face was exposed to the passerby was described by police as a white male who appeared to be 20 to 30 years old.
[2]Centralia police say the getaway cars looked like these.
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