Kyle Richards is breaking her silence following a traumatic burglary.
The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills cast member suffered a break-in over the New Year while on vacation with her family in Aspen, Colorado, in which the burglars took more than $1 million in jewellery and handbags.
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“Everything was taken,” Richards told PEOPLE Thursday. “Everything my mother, who passed away, had ever collected and saved to give to me — that I had always envisioned of passing on to my four daughters — was gone. Even my children’s baby bracelets. Obviously those are the things that hurt the most, things that I can’t replace. They’re completely invaluable.”
“The material things, yes they can be replaced, but they also hurt,” she continued. “I feel embarrassed to say that, but those are things that were either given to me by someone that I care about or that I worked really hard for. So it hurts no matter what.”
Richards said she and her husband were alerted on their phones around 1:15 a.m. the day after arriving in Aspen with a notification saying someone was in their closet. At first, she didn’t believe anyone could be breaking in.
“I said, ‘It must be something faulty with the app,’” Richards remembered. “We’ve got very tall gates on the house, a state-of-the-art home security system, and my housekeeper was sleeping there at the time. I thought. ‘I don’t believe that, that’s not possible.’”
Then, Richards saw pictures of the home invasion. “I was just devastated,” she says. “To think someone came in your home and ransacked something like that? It’s unspeakable.”
An investigation revealed that the house alarms were not armed at the time of the burglary due to a missing panel from the installation, which made the app used to activate the system from afar useless. The alert she received on her phone was triggered by a motion sensor.
Picking up the pieces in the aftermath, Richards said her family is taking extra precautions.
“The alarms are not just set every night but every day too. We set it as soon as someone walks in the door,” the Bravo star explained. “We have the cameras operational. We have my five dogs back, which if they had been there, I think things might have been different. And we have two armed guards on the property.”
“I feel safe now,” she said, adding that her first concern is always her children — Farrah, 29, Alexia, 21, Sophia, 17, and Porsha, 9. “My biggest concern was making sure my kids felt safe in their new home. … All I care about is that my family is safe.”
Photo credit: Facebook / Kyle Richards
