The Chimney Burglar

In Barcelona in 2014, a man decided that the best way to rob a clothing store was through the chimney. It is not obvious why he settled on a clothing store in particular. It is even less obvious why he settled on the chimney. What is documented is that, having settled on both, he then removed all of his clothes on the roof and attempted to lower himself down.

His reasoning was that taking off his clothes would make him narrower. It did not. Human adults are wider than nineteenth-century Spanish chimneys regardless of what they are wearing. The problem was not textile. It was skeletal.

Wedged

He made it roughly halfway down before he stopped moving. Arms pinned to his sides. Unable to go up. Unable to go down. Unable to turn. The chimney, in the old stone building that contained the target shop, was a narrow vertical tube that had been designed for smoke in 1890 and was now being asked to contain a fully grown twenty-first-century human. It declined.

He stayed there for two days. In summer. In Barcelona. With his clothes folded neatly on the roof, two storeys above him.

The silence, then the screaming

For most of the first day, by his own later account, he did not scream. Screaming would attract attention, and attention would mean being discovered halfway down a chimney with no clothes on and no reasonable explanation for either of those things. Silence was, in the short term, preferable to humiliation.

By the second day, the calculation shifted. The chimney had been absorbing Catalan summer sun and radiating heat from every surface. He had no water. He could not sit. He could not lie down. He could barely breathe in a rhythm that felt like breathing. Dehydration, claustrophobia, and the slow accumulation of physical consequence convinced him — eventually — that the remaining option was to scream and hope someone heard.

Passers-by on the street below did hear. They heard muffled shouting coming from somewhere inside a building and called the fire brigade. The fire brigade arrived. The fire brigade spent some time working out where, precisely, the shouting was coming from. Eventually someone looked up.

The rescue

Extracting him required partial demolition of the chimney. Brick by brick. From the outside. With the man still wedged inside. Firefighters later described the operation as one of the more unusual they had performed, which, in a city whose public life includes La Tomatina, is a meaningful claim.

He was brought out dehydrated, exhausted, covered in soot, and sunburned in places not normally exposed to direct sunlight. His clothes were retrieved separately. He was taken to hospital for rehydration and treatment of the injuries he had inflicted on himself by fighting a building for two days. Once medically cleared, he was arrested on suspicion of attempted burglary.

The legal question

Spanish criminal law, like most European systems, distinguishes between attempted and completed offences. For a burglary charge to proceed, prosecutors generally need to show either entry into the premises or, at minimum, a direct act of attempted entry. Getting stuck in the chimney of the premises you were trying to enter is, in technical terms, an attempted entry. It did not much matter that he had never reached the inside of the building. He had committed to the attempt.

Commercial premises in Spain are additionally required, under building regulations updated throughout the 2000s and 2010s, to have security-adequate structural openings — which typically means chimneys that have been capped, sealed, or retrofitted with grates at the roofline. The chimney in this case had not been capped. It was an ordinary working flue in a building old enough to predate the regulations. The fact that it worked perfectly well as a prison for the man trying to rob the shop was, for the shop owner, a kind of unasked-for security upgrade.

What the case leaves behind

The obvious lessons write themselves — chimneys are not doors; removing your clothes does not meaningfully change your skeletal width; if you are going to commit a crime, try to pick one that does not require you to fit through a nineteen-inch opening in a wall.

The more interesting lesson is the one about timing. The man did not get caught because he was discovered. He got caught because, after forty-eight hours of bargaining with a chimney, he decided that prison was preferable to continuing to negotiate. Pride is temporary. Dehydration is dangerous. And the chimney, as he eventually understood, was going to win every argument he was going to have with it.

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Listen to the full story on Dumb Crimes Europe, Episode 5. Stream the episode here.