Crime
Coffee shop crooks learn not to mess with annoyed baristas: These caffeine lovers are crime fighters
Burglars in Katy messed with the wrong coffee shop when they broke into a locally-owned cafe to steal hundreds of dollars in cash and equipment.
Surveillance cameras recorded two men smashing open the front door of Cloud Coffee on South Mason Road. The duo are seen searching the small shop for valuables before walking away with $600 from a cash register and a high-end coffee scale.
But thanks to an aggressive social media campaign, Cloud Coffee and its loyal customers may be honing in on the crooks, one of whom is believed to be behind a string of robberies at several nearby businesses.
"We're fortunate enough to have surveillance on every inch of the cafe."
"We flooded our Facebook page with pictures and video," manager Danae Dehoyos tells CultureMap, adding that the cafe is offering a small reward for information leading to an arrest.
"Amazingly, someone posted the name of one of the guys on the surveillance cameras. Whenever you search for him now, it shows that his Facebook profile has been deleted."
Dehoyos says she and her fellow baristas are sharing their detective work with the Harris County Sheriff's Office. She hopes the Facebook lead will bring the case to the close.
"This incident has been freaky for us," she explains. "You don't expect something like this to hit so close to home . . . We're fortunate enough to have surveillance on every inch of the cafe."
The sheriff's office asks anyone with information to call Crime Stoppers at 713-222-TIPS or submit a tip via the iWatchHarrisCounty phone app.
Watch KHOU Ch. 11's report on the case:
