SEATTLE — Police are searching for whoever stole a U-Haul filled with more than $20,000 worth of merchandise from a Seattle vintage pop-up shop.
"The first thing I started doing was just crying, I was just crying on and off for like hours throughout the day," said Malalay Sherzada, the owner of Salama Vintage.
It's been an emotional 24 hours for Sherzada.
“It wasn't just heartbreaking it felt like an attack," she said.
The theft happened after she came back from a vintage show on Sunday and parked a U-Haul outside her Magnolia home with much of her merchandise in it. The next morning it was gone, but just a couple of hours later the U-Haul was found at Mount Pleasant Cemetery in Queen Anne.
"A good Samaritan had called it in and it was the second U-Haul in two weeks that someone had abandoned at the cemetery,” said Sherzada.
She said the lock had been torn off from the U-Haul and when she opened it up, her merchandise was thrown around, with 90 percent of her vintage goods valued at more than $20,000 missing.
"That's like my livelihood, I'm a small business owner, I'm not out here making like a six-figure salary, I'm one person doing all of this work," said Sherzada.
She immediately posted about the crime on Instagram and within hours, another vintage store in Seattle reached out to her with a break in the case, after someone entered their store.
“She noticed this pattern and she immediately knew that this was one of my pieces and these were the people who had stolen my stuff," said Sherzada.
They contacted police and were able to arrest one of the suspects. Police said this is still an ongoing investigation and did not say if this case is related to the other abandoned U-Haul at Mount Pleasant Cemetery.
"Between my crying spells and my like just feeling of devastation, it's just felt so good to have community," said Sherzada.