Busted in Tennessee: Were Bluffton’s Tanger sunglass burglars part of $1.3M crime ring?
The sun is setting on a crime ring that may be responsible for pinching sunglasses from four specialty shops in two southeast states, including about 1,600 pairs of high-end eyewear from Bluffton.
Three Miami men were arrested in Tennessee late last month in connection with an alleged million-dollar, multi-state theft ring targeting Sunglass Hut stores. The thefts may have begun at the location in Bluffton’s Tanger Outlets 2, where power-sawing suspects cleared the shelves of merchandise while burrowing between stores in a Jan. 11 heist.
Charges were pending for the Bluffton burglary, one other case in the Nashville area and a Jan. 18 theft at a Sunglass Hut in Gaffney, SC.
Alexander Trujillo-Gomez, 48, Xavier Perez, 52, and Lazaro Salazar-Hechavarria, 28, were each charged with two counts of burglary, a misdemeanor vandalism offense and theft of property totaling $250,000 or more, according to police in Murfreesboro, TN, located southeast of Nashville.
Murfreesboro police said the trio burglarized the local Sunglass Hut on Jan. 26, stealing about $285,000 worth of merchandise and $2,000 in cash. They are also considered suspects in similar thefts at Sunglass Hut locations in Hendersonville, TN, Gaffney, SC and Bluffton, according to reporting by WGNS Radio.
The men were arrested Jan. 29 after a license plate reading camera in the Nashville area identified a minivan that had been rented in Miami and allegedly used in the burglaries. Reports say the suspects were detained at a UPS store where they had paid to ship some of the stolen merchandise to Florida.
Authorities stopped the shipment and seized roughly $400,000 worth of sunglasses, officials at the Murfreesboro Police Department said.
After executing search warrants at two Miami homes in early February, agents from the Department of Homeland Security recovered about $890,000 in designer sunglasses that had been stolen from Murfreesboro and the two South Carolina locations.
Altogether, police have uncovered about $1.3 million in stolen merchandise and cash that was reportedly nabbed from South Carolina and Tennessee, with the bulk of the thieves’ spoils being shipped to Florida.
Staff Sgt. Robert Herlong, a spokesperson for the Beaufort County Sheriff’s Office, said the Jan. 11 burglary at the Sunglass Hut in the Bluffton-area Tanger Outlets 2 was still active as investigators looked into “any connections” between the inter-state cases.
It was unclear if or when the men would be extradited to Beaufort County.
Trujillo-Gomez, Perez and Salazar-Hechavarria remained in custody at the Rutherford Adult Detention Center near Murfreesboro, each held on a $1 million bond. Their first hearings were scheduled for Feb. 13.
This story was originally published February 12, 2025 at 1:27 PM.
