Brazen thefts of pottery aggravate store's owners

Barbara Pitonzo and her husband, Joseph, have owned Glazed Expressions Pottery, 2618 E. Fort Lowell Road, where they sell large pottery, planters and fountains, since 2010. Despite having 16 security cameras throughout the property, thieves continue to hit their business. Last year, security cameras, pumps and pottery were stolen in five different incidents.

The latest incidents happened about 1:30 a.m. on Dec. 30 and in broad daylight during business hours on Jan. 7.

In the Dec. 30 incident, security cameras caught a truck driving slowly on Fort Lowell Road and a man wearing a gray hoodie jumped out and cut the lock on the property's side gate with bolt cutters. Two other men in hoodies showed up and they all disappeared for a few minutes, Barbara Pitonzo believes, to see if there was any type of response.

When the trio returned, they spent about 40 minutes taking pottery and loading up their truck.

"They knew what they were doing, they had lookouts; this wasn't their first rodeo," she said.

The Pitonzos are still doing an inventory of their merchandise to find exactly what was taken, but they know the thieves took several hand-painted, brightly colored Mexican Talavera pots worth between $3,000 and $4,000.

And they didn't just grab whatever they could easily take, they hand-picked matching pottery, Pitonzo said. She believes the pots were taken for a landscaping job.

"They took high-end pottery," she said. "They passed up stuff that didn't fit in the color range they were looking at, which was all blues and greens."

At about 3:45 p.m., Jan. 7, while Pitonzo and her husband were inside the store, thieves struck again.

When Pitonzo went to the front, she noticed the three pots she had put out on display outside that morning were gone.

"I noticed it about five minutes after it was done," she said.

The couple played back their security footage and saw a late-model Chevy car without license plates pull into the parking lot, back up into the display and a person in a hoodie load two Talavera pots in the trunk and a third in the backseat.

The recent thefts are particularly discouraging to Pitonzo because the couple, who opened the store using all of their savings, rely on the revenue from their store to survive.

"Everything's on the line here and we're having a hard enough time with the economy and everything else and for somebody to ... twice in a week come in and start taking stuff it's personal," she said. "I can't afford to have thousands of dollars in inventory walk out the door; it's tight already."

The recent incidents have made Pitonzo "jumpy," and caused her to become hypersensitive to her surroundings, constantly keeping an eye out for suspicious people and vehicles.

"I am incredibly angry, but I find myself suspicious of everybody," she said. "I am on high alert."

In the Dec. 30 incident one of the men dropped his cellphone cover, but police were unable to lift any fingerprints off it, said Sgt. Maria Hawke, a Tucson Police Department spokeswoman.

Because there aren't any prints or any clear images of the suspects, there isn't enough evidence to assign the case to a detective, Hawke said. But, the captain of the Operations Division Midtown is aware of the incidents, which were discussed in a Wednesday-morning meeting and he is speaking with the burglary unit to see if there is any trend related to the items stolen, she said. He has instructed officers in the division to conduct special checks in the area "time and call load permitting," Hawke said.

The couple have taken measures to protect their store. Along with the security cameras, they have barbed wire around most of the perimeter of the courtyard where most of the pottery is kept. Any time movement is detected at the store, the cameras send an alert to the Pitonzos' phones, which were regularly ignored because of their frequency and the camera's sensitivity to even the slightest movement. But now, Pitonzo says she's checking every alert.

Joseph Pitonzo was working on building a giant wooden shelf Wednesday afternoon, that could hold pieces of pottery and be displayed in front of the store on the bed of his truck. The shelf can only be moved by forklift. They're also considering extending the height of the walls at the front of the store that don't have barbed wire.

And Barbara Pitonzo has taken to social media to post photos from the surveillance cameras from the Dec. 30 theft, hoping someone will recognize a person or a logo on one of the thieves' jackets.

"Somebody knows what that logo is; somebody's seen these pots."

"They knew what they were doing, they had lookouts; this wasn't their first rodeo."

Barbara Pitonzo, co-owner of Glazed Expressions Pottery

Contact reporter Veronica Cruz at vcruz@azstarnet.com or 573-4224.