Five people broke into a Sprint telephone office in Las Vegas early Sunday and made off with telephone-switching equipment, causing a seven-hour interruption of phone service to 75,000 customers, police said.
"It's what they call a 'swarm robbery,'" said Steve Meriwether of the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department. "They were trying to get in through the back door, and it didn't work. So somehow they got an employee to open the front."
The thieves went to the front door of the switching office after a failed attempt to break through the back door using a blow torch. Armed with hand guns and stun guns, the thieves were after computer equipment from the switching office, Meriwether said.
Phones went down at 8 a.m. Sunday, and service was fully restored by 3:30 p.m., according to a Sprint spokesman Lloyd Karnes, who refused to provide any details about the heist.
The company would only identify the stolen goods as hardware related to telephone-switching equipment. Karnes said its value had not been determined.
The big question is why anyone would want to steal such specialized equipment.
"Unless somebody runs a facility themselves, they wouldn't have any other need for it other than to resell it," said Karnes.
The robbers tied up two employees and used stun guns to shock them, then beat one of the workers, police said. The identities of the victims were not available from police, who said the beating victim was in serious condition at a Las Vegas hospital.
Karnes said central office security staff cannot defend all possible avenues of entry.
"We have what we think are good security systems in place ... protecting [us from] this sort of thing, though obviously they're not fail-proof," he said.
Sprint provides local phone service to 800,000 people in the Las Vegas area at 10 switching offices, including the one robbed Sunday.
