Federal authorities announced a $10,000 reward Thursday in hopes of finding the masked perpetrator who broke into a northern Wisconsin pawnshop and hauled out more than 30 guns in a sack last summer.
A year later, about a dozen weapons have been recovered in Minneapolis and elsewhere, but the burglar remains on the loose.
The reward in connection with the break-in of Bay Area Pawn in Ashland, Wis., on July 30, 2018, was pulled together by the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) in conjunction with the Ashland Police Department and the National Shooting Sports Foundation, the trade association for the firearms industry.
Also Thursday, the ATF released two fuzzy store surveillance photos of the suspect, which offered few clues about a description.
"We don't even know if the subject is male or female," said agency spokeswoman Ashlee J. L. Sherrill.
In October Minneapolis police were called to an apartment complex across the street from police union headquarters in Northeast, after a worker found a bag of guns in a room used to access the heating and cooling system, according to filings in the case.
Peeking inside, he counted seven handguns, and police traced them to the Ashland burglary.
Another stolen firearm — a Ruger .380-caliber handgun — was apparently recovered in September at a south Minneapolis gas station, roughly 200 miles southwest of where the break-in occurred.
