Cosmos Cafe Burglarized for Second Time This Summer

suffered its second break-in this summer some time late Friday or early Saturday, and this time, the burglar was a real Grinch.

Besides emptying the cash register drawer, the thief robbed a tip jar – containing all the money a young girl had been saving to visit her ancestral homeland.

According to the police report:

At 9:30 a.m. Saturday, the woman who along with her husband co-owns Cosmos, 7203 W. North Ave., reported that her restaurant had been burglarized overnight, for the second time in just over two months.

The woman said that when she and her husband had left the restaurant at 10 p.m. Friday, they had carefully locked the doors. But when she started serving customers in the morning, she found the cash register drawer empty.

Her 11-year-old daughter then noticed that a tip jar on the counter also had been emptied. The girl had been saving the tip money for a trip to Greece.

The woman checked the rear door of the restaurant and found that it had been forced open, just as it was on July 5 in an earlier burglary that also cost her family all the cash in the drawer.

She said this time she had some reason to suspect a former employee who had been fired recently, but did not want to name him at this time to police in case he was not in fact responsible.

In the earlier incident, her husband had called police when he arrived to open the cafe on July 5 after being closed on Independence Day. He had found the register drawer on the floor and a trail of coins leading to the back door.

In that instance, nothing other than the cash drawer had been disturbed.