I November morning back in 2018 six individuals walked into Johannesburg sneaker shop Court Order with criminality on their minds. Armed with a gun they tied up the shop owner and proceeded to fill bags full of sneakers.
Amongst the ill-gotten sneakers was one of the rarest shoes in existence – The “Freddy Krueger” Nike Dunk SB Lows.
Basilus Consilium Professional Service investigator Abel Roman provides some expositional background on the Krugers:
The sneakers, produced in 2007, featured the same red and green stripes as the sweater worn by the Freddy Krueger character in Nightmare on Elm Street and were decorated with imitation blood spatter.
But production was halted at the last minute after the producers of the horror-film franchise, New Line Cinema, threatened Nike with legal action over breach of copyright.
Nike had to can the manufacturing but by that time they had already sent off some shipments so they had to recall all of them and had to destroy them. They had to build a big pile, throw diesel and burn them. But in the course of that process, a few came out. Nobody knows how many.”
Nearly three years later and the shoes and the culprits have yet to be located and the case, which was put on ice four months after the robbery, could be reignited thanks to newly surfaced CCTV footage.
The footage was located, according to reports, on a previously overlooked hard drive. The video shows the exact moment the rare shoe was put into a bad and absconded away with.
We use the word “shoe” because only one was taken. According to investigator Roman , the shoe was provided to the shop by tennis coach and sneaker enthusiast Brandon Ebersey as part of Court Order’s opening display.
Roman added, “They took high-value sneakers but nowhere near the [value of the] Freddy Kruegers, but they only took one, which makes it worthless. The big mystery is: where is the sneaker?”
Roman’s colleague Wesley Massangwani said the faces of the six robbers were clear enough on the video footage to allow them to be identified, beginning the investigation anew.
