The Great Robbery

Ok, so I've owed you guys this story for a little over a week now. Sorry for the delay! Thanks to all of you who showed your support when I mentioned that Christian got robbed. He is ok, so is everyone else who got robbed, and here is what happened:

March 19, 2009: Christian and his friends from work go out to eat to celebrate one of the guy's birthdays. They had planned to celebrate the week before, but had to push it back a week. I almost joined them in the celebration, but when they rescheduled the evening, they decided to go to a restaurant called Mar de Viña and, well, as the name eludes to they serve mariscos (seafood). Ever since living in Chile, I can't stand seafood (except some fish and of course sushi--but not mussels, oysters, nada). So I was at home sulking over the lost photos* and waiting for my husband to get home when I get a phone call at approx. 10pm. I thought he'd be saying "Hi honey, I'm on my way home." But instead I heard, "Amor, tuvimos un problemita acá en el restaurant. Tres tipos entraron y sacaron todo de varias personas, pero ahora todo está bien, estamos con los caribineros." Translation: My love, we had a slight problem in the restaurante. Three guys entered and took everything from a few people, but we are ok now and the cops are here." In that first little bit, he just forgot to mention the guys had guns and had stolen his wallet--he was trying to keep me calm, but either way it didn't really work.

So basically he and about 12 of his coworkers (bosses included) were eating dinner when these idiots showed up, pistols in hand, telling everyone to take out their wallets, cell phones and jewerly. One of the robbers tried to open up the cash register, but it had some sort of safe code on it and they got nervious. So they grabbed as much of the stuff that people had put on the tables as they could and they left, running about a block where a car was waiting for them. There were quite a few people in the restaurant that night, around 100 according to newspapers, but not everyone lost something. In fact, only about 10-12 people total (according to Christian and his friends) had things stolen, and these were the people who were sitting closest to the door. Takeaway: do NOT sit by the front door of a restaurant in Chile.

Fortunately, Christian did not lose his cell phone, just his wallet. He noticed that the robbers weren't really taking their time to make sure everyone had given them everything, so he kept his phone hidden (good thing I didn't call him right when the robbery was taking place). One of his bosses actually was smart enough to take his cash out of the wallet before handing it over. The other good thing is that Christian decided not to take his camera that evening, which is odd, as he is always the token photographer at friend's events. At the end of the day, most people didn't lose too much money, but instead are stuck with the hassle of having to get a new ID card, new driver's license, new bank and credit cards, etc. Supposedly the owner of the restaurant is going to reimburse them for the ID card and driver's license...but I'll believe it when I see it. We are just happy that Christian and everyone is ok and that March is almost over (this month has been such a bad luck month)!

For your viewing pleasure, I have included a video of the news coverage of the robbery as well as an short article about the situation (all in Spanish).

Delincuentes asaltan restaurant y a clientes en Providencia

Channel 13 News Coverage:


*What happened with his computer is that he had the Safeboot program loaded on it, which encrypts your hard drive until you enter in a password. Well something went wrong and the program didn't want to recognize Christian's password and thus locked itself down. My husband works in forensic computer analysis and nothing could unlock this disk. So from the computer standpoint, the pictures were gone. However, the hubbs being the smart man his is, decided to see what he could recover from his camera. I don't know how, but he was able to recover pictures he had deleted from his camera & memory card and actually found the pictures that we had lost for the wedding! Yay!!!