A year later, no charges in $12M Cherry Creek jewelry heist

One year after a sophisticated quartet of criminals pulled off one of the largest jewelry heists in Denver history, no one has been charged and only one of the alleged four has been arrested.

And mum is still the word. The parent company of Denver’s Hyde Park Jewelers still declines to discuss what happened and the Denver Police Department still refuses to release its reports, photos and videos from the brazen burglary, because its investigation is still open.

The deficit of arrests and charges in the case raises the possibility that three-fourths of the band of burglars, said to have ties to South America, have gotten away with the crime.

At 7:40 p.m. July 21, 2024, four people dressed like construction workers in hard hats and reflective vests stepped out of a Ford F-150 with a missing license plate, grabbed their saws, drills and power torches, and walked into the Cherry Creek Shopping Center.

Once inside, the four entered a unit adjacent to Hyde Park Jewelers, cut through the wall, climbed inside the closed store, and spray-painted its security cameras black, according to an affidavit that Denver Police Det. William Monahan filed in February. The heist crew then spent eight hours looting the store, which held $20 million worth of high-end jewelry.

Halfway through the burglary, one of the four tripped an alarm. But when a mall security guard peered in around 11:30 p.m., nothing looked amiss and the guard assumed it was a false alarm.

A Hyde Park employee arriving for work just before 5 a.m. was the first to learn of the break-in. By then, the quartet of heisters had been westbound on Interstate 70 for more than an hour. With them were bags of Rolexes, Tudor watches and other jewelry later valued at $12.3 million.

Using data from cell towers and cameras, Monahan’s investigation placed the burglars on eastbound I-70 into Denver a week before the crime, in an employee-only area of the Cherry Creek Shopping Center four days before, and at a Lowe’s store in Westminster on the day of, where one of them allegedly stole the spray paint used in the burglary.

After the burglary, the four drove to California, according to the detective. By October, Denver police had tracked at least one of them, Gustavo Ignacio Salas Ortega, to White Plains, N.Y., and warned the FBI there that he might strike a mall Tiffany store and watch shop. While surveilling the mall, police noticed an SUV that sped away when approached.

The SUV’s occupants were later arrested. The three Chileans and one Peruvian national included Salas Ortega, who is said to have a history of robberies and burglaries in Chile and Ecuador. Phones belonging to the four allegedly included directions to Hyde Park and other Denver jewelry stores, searches for blowtorch accessories and photos of heisted jewelry.