“Total shock and disbelief” is how Zaffer Coskun describes discovering his Mooroopna pizza business was being broken into while he was coming to terms with his own personal flood crisis.
“Total shock and disbelief that someone could get that low and do something like that,” he said.
“It was just another blow. That’s when it really (hit that), sadly, something like that could actually happen after all that.
“We’re trying to keep our spirits up. You know, natural disasters we can’t do much about, you can’t really help that, but things like this, it’s just unbelievable.”
Mr Coskun was awoken by alarms early on Wednesday (October 19) morning alerting him that his business, Che Che’s Pizza on Macisaac Rd, was being broken into.
“It actually happened at 20 to seven (6.40am), I got alerts on my phone and I checked the camera on my phone and yeah, there was someone in my shop,” he said.
“They were pretty much ransacking it looking for money.
“They took a guide dog container for donations. I had one of them and they raided the tip jar, took the gold coins out of the tip jar, and then walked out with the guide dog Labrador.
“On the footage, I can see they walked past and came back and smashed it with a hammer and kicked it in, the bottom part of the glass door and then crawled over the sandbags.”
Che Che’s was open on Saturday, with Mr Coskun and others then working through the night to sandbag around the shop.
“It was about four o’clock in the morning (Sunday), we were still here watching the water come over Echuca Rd, watched it come up the service lane on Echuca Rd there, around the corner and surrounded the shop and then we left and went home and came back (a few hours later) and it was pretty much up to the windows and in and outside the shop,” he said.
Then, after all that effort, for the business to be inundated and then robbed had been tough, Mr Coskun said.
“Devastated, absolutely devastated,” he said.
“I’ve only been in business since July. I bought the business in July. Pretty much everything I had I’ve put into it. It was all, just in a blink of an eye, gone.”
A single father-of-five, Mr Coskun is determined to get the business back up and running.
“Abosolutely, absolutely. I don’t want to go backwards, I only want to go forwards from here,” he said.
“It’s a bit hard to say when, because we haven’t even started the clean-up yet.
“The water’s only just gone away today (Wednesday), so we can come to the shop — we haven’t been able to access it.”
Mr Coskun urging people in flood-impacted areas to be vigilant and to report suspicious activity to police.
The robbery has been reported to Victoria Police, which earlier in the week, urged people to phone the Shepparton Police Station on 5820 5777 if they observed any suspicious behaviour or unfamiliar people loitering in an area.
“While police are hopeful people will do the right thing and support their fellow community members, we are aware that there are some out there that will take advantage of others in their time of need,” Sgt Josh McCabe said.
“If it appears as though an offence is being committed, please call 000.”
Mr Coskun said the thief also tried to break into a cigarette shop a few doors along the street.
He described the offender as most likely a male, aged about 16 or 17, wearing a black Nike jacket with a hood on it and carrying a hammer and a knife.
“We’re a row of shops here, so everybody’s going to be checking their security footage for me,” he said.