We in no way condone robbery, but if you’re going to go through the effort of crawling through a Walmart ceiling to steal from the store’s cash room, you should at least make sure that room is empty when you saw through the ceiling.

FOX2 in St. Louis reports that a man walked into a Collinsville, IL, Walmart in the wee hours of the morning yesterday. He then managed to sneak into the store’s drop ceiling and, like Judd Nelson in The Breakfast Club, make his way to the space just above a room where the store holds its cash.

This room has a drywalled ceiling, so the man had so use a saw to cut a hole.

“He tried to cut in there with a saw,” a the Collinsville police officer tells FOX2. “He was sawing through the ceiling, apparently to drop down into the offices. One of the cashiers went in there to make change or whatever.”

Because it’s not exactly easy to saw drywall without making a sound (and presumably kicking up some debris), the employee in the room below noticed. That employee told the manager, who called the police.

Realizing he had been caught mid-burglary, the man abandoned his unasked-for renovation work and fled.

“They heard him scampering through there like a rat and he got out,” says the officer. “He crawled into the ceiling and through there with people working. So he`s pretty bold.”

He did manage to keep his cool, walking back out the front door like someone who hadn’t just bungled an ill-conceived robbery attempt.

Given the ease with which the suspect got into the ceiling and located the cash room, the police believe that he had inside information about the store.

“We believe he has some type of knowledge of the set up,” says the officer. “Either he has worked there; he knows someone who works there or something to that effect. He`s got some kind of intricate knowledge that there`s money in that area.”

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