LA Fitness: Full of Cut Abs and Smashed Car Windows
At the top of their corporate homepage, the compandy says "LA Fitness: Where Fitness is a Way of Life." At the Fort Lauderdale location, a block north of the intersection of Oakland Park Blvd and Federal Highway, apparently tiny bits of shattered glass from car windows is also a way of life.
flickr.com user: jaded rabies
Not what you'd like to see after a good workout.
After a break-in there this weekend, the victim says a responding BSO deputy told her they have at least one call to that location "every single day." That's at least car broken into per day.
In this particular incident, the victim hid her purse and removed all valuables from plain sight. (Signs in the LA Fitness parking lot warn that the club is not responsible for items stolen during your workout.) Fortunately for her ("fortune" in the relative sense), nothing was stolen from the car (police suspect someone came upon the crime in-progress and the would-be thief scampered off). Still, this victim had to foot the nearly $200 bill to replace the window. That'd pay for about six months of gym membership there. (Full disclosure: at least two Juice contributors are LA Fitness members and neither has experienced a break-in at that location.)
A manager at the club, Mike Terwilliger, says there have been a rash of "smash and grabs" recently, but that "it goes it spurts." Asked several times, he did not say how many break-ins had occurred there last week, nor would he give an estimate of about how many occur in an average week.
An information request has been sent to the Broward Sherriff's Office.
"Every healthclub is gonna be an ideal target," says Terwilliger (who, when I spoke with him, said he was too busy to spell his last name). "We don't get the protection we should be getting for the tax dollars we're spending."
He says he was a victim of a break-in himself recently, though not at the gym.
"Sometimes we go a long period of time without one, then we get a rash of them," Terwilliger said before getting off the phone to help a customer.
The victim from this weekend says she'll probably just work out at the Boca Raton location in the future.
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