LITTLE ROCK, Ark. – A surveillance video shared by a pharmacy owner is shedding light on the national opioid crisis after two men attempt to break into the store.
“That just screams desperation,” says Andrew Harp the pharmacist and owner City of Pharmacy located on 18th and Broadway.
The video shows two men being dropped off around 1:00 a.m. on Thursday.
They walk around the building looking inside and leave but only to return with a sledgehammer.
“That’s pretty serious that you take a sledgehammer to a brick wall and try to make whole big enough for a person to get in and out,” Harp explains.
The men hammered away at the stone wall for less than a minute and appeared to give up but left behind the sledgehammer.
Harp says that this further shows just how serious and desperate opioid abusers are getting.
“Even though they didn’t get in and get anything. It’s still a pretty serious deal going on,” Harp says.
However, this isn’t the first time someone has targeted City Pharmacy. Harp says back in 2015, two men broke in through the front door and in under 45 seconds took cash and thousands of dollars in opioid prescription drugs.
“Something like this happens you just don’t forget about it this thing sticks with you,” he explains. “You’re always kind of worried about it.”
The Little Rock Police department took the sledgehammer as evidence and say this is still an active investigation.
“It’s bad for these guys, they obviously have a problem,” says Harp.
Harp says he hopes the two men are caught but only so they can receive the help they desperately need.
“Of course, it needs to end, I mean because people are dying. I mean this is killing people every day,” says Harp.
There have been more than 400,000 deaths in the U.S. over the past two decades related to the opioid crisis, according to the Association of Arkansas Counties.
