The brutal bandits performed the smash and grab just before lunchtime on Monday and were caught on security cameras.
Footage released by police shows three men, all disguised in black, armed with hammers and bags for the loot.
The target was a well-known jeweler, Petersen Jewelers on Papanui Rd in Merivale, near Bealey Ave.
Do or Dye hair salon owner Celine-Marie Lamberton works right next door to the jewelers and said she was first alerted to the robbery by a loud noise.
“Then I just heard crackling, yelling and screaming,” she added.
She said her barber client grabbed her and they went to the back of the shop, away from the windows.
“I looked up and this big tall man – he must have been the last man because there were three – walked in all in black,” she said.
They had black tops and pants, black sunglasses and gloves, and had balaclavas on their heads.
Lamberton said she was scared and hid by the pools.
“I got up and I thought…I should lock the door…it was probably a little late by then,” she says.
“I went to the police, I looked at my phone and it was 11:45 am. I called 111.”
Lamberton says all she could hear was “yelling, banging and banging.” She thinks the robbers “were in the jewelry store for two minutes, but felt like twenty minutes.”
The robbers had smashed the glass cabinets along the counter and took what they could, with glass all over the floor.
“I heard one of them (the owners) grab a crowbar, but you just heard banging and banging and screaming,” she said.
Lamberton’s client told her the sound sounded like “gunshots”, but it was just “slap and grab and bang”.
She said the robbers had parked near a nursery and Selwyn House School and used a stolen silver Mazda Demio as a getaway car.
“They must have had a driver because the three of them jumped in the car and then they went from Merivale Lane to Papanui Road and screeched around the corner to Webb Street and left,” she said.
Police confirmed a number of items had been stolen and said they are “in the early stages of an investigation…including conducting a local investigation”.
The store’s owners thanked people for their concern and declined to comment further.
They spent all Monday afternoon with the police and cleaning up the mess left behind.
Police released photos late Monday of the three attackers taken from CCTV cameras as they entered the jewelry store and “would like to hear from anyone who can identify them”.
-By Hamish Clark