Multiple people used power tools, including saws and blow torches, to break into a high-end jewelry store inside the Cherry Creek Mall and stole roughly $12.3 million worth of jewelry last summer, according to the arrest affidavit in the case.

The investigation into the multimillion-dollar burglary began in July 2024, when police received a call from Hyde Park Jewelers that the store was burglarized overnight while the Cherry Creek Mall was closed.

The heist was reported last summer, but details emerged this week in a newly released arrest affidavit for one of the suspects, 32-year-old Gustavo Salas-Ortega.

The Denver Police detective investigating the theft responded to the original burglary report and called the police at 5:25 a.m. on July 22, 2024. The report says “an employee arrived at the store at approximately 4:50 a.m. and discovered that unknown suspects had entered the store by cutting through the wall of an adjacent store.”

The affidavit says that security at the Cherry Creek Shopping Center responded to an alarm report at the store at 11:30 p.m. that night before. Security officers believed it was a “false alarm” because “nothing appeared out of place when they looked through the storefront window,” the affidavit says.

The detective notes in the affidavit that he watched the store’s surveillance video. It showed four suspects dressed like construction workers with hard hats and reflective vests entered the mall at approximately 7:40 p.m.

They were carrying power tools into the mall, according to the affidavit. The detective noted that the “damaged safes and secured storage areas appeared to have been broken into using various power tools, including saws, drills, and blow torches.”

The report says the video shows the suspects arriving and leaving the mall in a Ford F-150 pickup truck with no license plates.

The officer reported that the store manager conducted an inventory and initially determined that numerous watches and high-end jewelry pieces worth an estimated $20 million were missing. In October, the detective learned the total loss to the store was about $12.3 million.

During the investigation, a review of the surveillance video showed the suspects spent eight hours inside the store, “cutting into the vault and others secured containers to steal the expensive watches and jewelry,” the affidavit says.

The Denver Police detective partnered with the FBI and learned the theft appeared to be part of an “ongoing pattern of burglaries to jewelry stores that had occurred all over the United States and resulted in millions of dollars in losses.”

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