“At 12:06 a.m. I got a picture on my phone,” he said of the moment he got a text from the hunting camera he had set up to surveil the outside of the business.

He called his dad, Campbell’s Polaris manager Steve Gilpin, who advised him to call the police.

“Fifteen minutes later they showed up, but it was too late — they got out the back,” Connor said.

Upon coming into work at the Shawville business on Monday, Connor found out that two more vehicles had been stolen earlier on the evening of the 26th.

“A customer came in, and he was asking if his bike was ready, and [ . . . ] I went back to look for it, and I said, ‘I hate to tell you, but your bike’s not here,” he said.

According to footage from his hunting camera and from the shop’s rotating security camera, Connor says the thefts appear to involve the same person, each time with a partner, stealing two vehicles around 8:30 p.m. on July 26, and then returning again to steal two more just after midnight that night.

Connor said it’s impossible to confirm from the footage if the partner is the same each time. “The other person we can’t get a face on,” he said.

Polaris higher-ups were able to locate one vehicle using its built-in GPS, sending the coordinates to the Sûreté du Québec so they could track it down.

Connor said officers found it on Wednesday night at a remote location nearly two hours north of Shawville, and returned it to the dealership on Thursday morning.

He said while none of the other three vehicles have a built-in GPS, he is hoping the police can use the tracking capabilities of the first vehicle to track down the other three.

“The cops can track everywhere that bike went,” he said.

Connor said the thieves would have had to drive the vehicles down a sheer 40-foot drop-off out the back of the locked enclosure where they keep their vehicles, just to get them off the Polaris lot. “I never thought someone would drive out there.”

He said the back of the enclosure, which is usually fenced off, has been open lately due to renovations they are doing.

It’s this fact and others that lead the business to believe the thefts happened by someone with knowledge of the area.

The first thefts occurred shortly after 8 p.m. on Saturday evening, which is less than a half-hour after Connor left for his party in Campbell’s Bay. Steve was also away on vacation that week.

“It’s someone that knows the area for sure,” Connor said.

Steve said the shop has never seen issues with theft, and that he thought they were doing a decent job of keeping the premises secure, but now is considering some changes.

“The only other thing we’re thinking of doing is putting cement barriers around the inside perimeter of the fence,” he said, explaining this could better secure the opening at the back of the fence so vehicles cannot exit.

He said with the high price tag on these vehicles, they want to do what they can to avoid this again in the future. In total, the vehicles were worth almost $200,000, including a customer’s vehicle valued at around $60,000. “This is huge for us,” said Steve.

Sûreté du Québec communications officer Sgt. Marc Tessier confirmed that police officers responded to a call on July 27 for breaking and entering and theft. He said no arrest has been made, and the investigation is ongoing. He said no further information is available at this time, so as not to interfere with the investigation.

Security cameras on the Campbell’s Bay Polaris property captured this images of one of two men that employees believe were involved in stealing a total of four vehicles from the business after 8 p.m. on July 26 and again just after midnight on July 27.

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