Looted businesses struggle as George Floyd protests continue. ‘All I could do was watch’

After some protests turned violent, business owners are trying to pick up the pieces following looting and vandalism at their stores.

“As a small business, when you get hit, it’s hard to get back up,” Kia Saleki, whose family has owned a jewelry store in Santa Monica, Calif., for 40 years, told the Los Angeles Times.

Saleki waited inside his shop Sunday as people protesting the death of George Floyd filled the streets.

Some attempted to pry open the steel gate that protected the store, but to no avail, according to the Times.

Floyd, a black man, died after a Minneapolis police officer knelt on his neck for several minutes, despite his pleas that he couldn’t breathe. Protests have been held across the country after his death on May 25.

The violence and looting is being done by much smaller groups at mostly peaceful gatherings, authorities say. The vast majority of the protesters across the nation have been “peaceful demonstrators calling for change,” law enforcement officials told ABC News.

Not far away from Saleki’s store, masked people broke through the security gate at Santa Monica Tobacco, nabbing lottery tickets, cigars and cigarettes, among other things, the Times reported. One group took a sledgehammer to the ATM, beating it until it cracked and they could grab its cash, according to the newspaper.

The owner, identified only as Moe, said he was helpless to stop it.

“All I could do was watch. I couldn’t do anything,” he said, according to the Times. “It felt like everything that I had worked to build for 18 years they could just wipe out in a matter of minutes.”

It was a similar story in Chicago, where nail technician Lillian Wright said people shattered the salon’s storefront, stealing nearly everything inside, cash register included, the Chicago Sun-Times reported.

“This is one of the shops on 79^th Street with all black workers,” Wright, a black woman, told the Sun-Times. “This has never happened. This doesn’t make sense. This is not protesting. This is looting.”

The salon had been closed for months due to the coronavirus pandemic, and Wright said she was looking forward to getting back to work on Wednesday, the Sun-Times reported.

“I haven’t been making money for three months,” Wright told the newspaper. “How do we come back to work with nothing to work with?”

In Atlanta, Kris Shelby lives above Attom, the luxury clothing shop he manages, and awoke around 1 a.m. on Saturday to the sound of gunfire just outside, the Times reported.

When he went down to the store at 5 a.m., all the merchandise was gone, according to the newspaper.

“A lot of people don’t know the blood, sweat and tears that go into being a business owner and the type of sacrifices we had to go through to be where we’re at right now,” Shelby told the Times.

Shelby and his business partner have dressed celebrities such as Justin Bieber and Migos and supplied clothing to the movie “Black Panther,” the newspaper reported.

An image of the ransacked store was shared to the Attom Instagram with the caption: THIS IS NOT THE ANSWER. We send our condolences to other black owned businesses around the country who have been a victim to such activity.

“It hurt. It seriously hurt,” Shelby said of George Floyd’s death, the Times reported. “But as a black man, and this is a black-owned business, it’s just sad. It really leaves a bad taste in our mouths, to be honest.”

Dan Buxton’s sporting goods shop in San Diego had been open for less than a year when people made off with golf clubs, baseball bats and other merchandise, the San Diego Union Tribune reported.

The small business, like many, was hit hard by the coronavirus pandemic, staying afloat largely thanks to quarantined people buying home fitness equipment, according to the newspaper.

The store suffered roughly $200,000 in damage from the looting, and Buxton said he’s not sure he’ll be able to make it back, the Tribune reported.

“I put everything I had earned into this place; basically my whole life savings into this business,” according to the newspaper. “I thought it was a complete loss. That all the money and all the time I had invested into this place was gone.”

The owners of The Urban Grape, a wine, beer and liquor store in Boston, said people broke into their store with sledgehammers and stole cash registers, the Boston Globe reported.

Hadley Douglas, who owns the store with her husband, TJ, said there wasn’t any cash in the store as they’d only been accepting credit card payments for pickup due to the coronavirus pandemic, according to the Globe.

She said the cost of the damage is small in comparison to the cause.

“Our broken windows are nothing compared to 400 years of broken lives,” she told the Globe. “Please don’t let what happened after the protest drown out the more important story — our country wants and needs change. Our time is now.”