Dan Telleen doesn’t expect he’ll retrieve the $27,000 gold necklace that was stolen from his jewelry store in Vail on Saturday, but he is hopeful that authorities will apprehend the suspect.

“We got a really good picture of him,” said Telleen, referencing the security footage taken from Karats Vail on Meadow Drive.

Telleen and his store, which doubles as a workshop, are Vail institutions. The jeweler said he’s had other incidents of theft in his 55 years in the business, but said this is “a big one.”

The suspect is a man with dark hair and a cropped beard who entered the store just before 5 p.m. on Saturday wearing a white t-shirt and a dark blue puffy vest. Telleen said the man had a thick accent and wanted to see gold chains.

“When he came in, I gave him attention right away, like, ‘Where are you from?'” Telleen said. “He didn’t look like our regular customer. I’ve been trained, and so has everybody else in the store, when somebody isn’t typical or when you get a funny feeling about somebody, give them lots of attention.”

Telleen said the man winced when he looked at the price tag of one of the chains.

“Eventually, I went to find a catalog of just gold chains, thinking that this would be more in his price range,” Telleen said. “Well, while we were doing all this, servicing him, helping him, we had three things out. He picked up two of them and sort of felt the weight against each other to see which one had heft, which is not unusual. He set them back down in the tray, but he had one trailing through his palm and put the other onto the tray. He backed off. And we didn’t notice. We didn’t see him do it.”

Telleen and an associate in the store immediately realized the chain was missing minutes after the man walked out of the store and called the police.  

“As we were putting things away, it was like, ‘Uh-oh,’ Telleen said. “And I ran out and I couldn’t see where he’d gone.”

Vail police reviewed footage from security cameras and were able to see the man walk away from the store, walk down Meadow Drive, turn left, and walk across the bridge to Checkpoint Charlie, but lost track of the man as he walked into a crowd on Gore Creek Drive.  

“It would have been nice to have him get into a car and get an idea of what he’s driving,” Telleen said. “We had a great photo of him and a video of him taking the piece. When we talked to the police, they got all the information we had and they sent it out for facial recognition.”

Telleen said the man is well known to the FBI and other federal agencies and that there was another alleged crime involving the same man, based off facial recognition software, earlier this week in Utah. The man is wanted for crimes in other states such as Texas and Missouri, Telleen said authorities told him.

Telleen said he expects that the man who took the necklace has already melted it down.

“He’s not going to try and sell it as a necklace,” Telleen said. “It’s just a lump of gold. And he doesn’t really care about that price tag. What he cares about is how much gold there is, and what he can sell the gold for?”

If there’s a silver lining, it’s that Telleen has great insurance. He called to make a claim within an hour of the theft on Saturday night, spoke to an agent, and by Monday, his insurance company had reviewed his policy and told him the necklace was covered after he paid the deductible.