ROXBURY – In between making sandwiches and pizzas for customers on Friday afternoon at Ellis Pond Variety on Route 120, owner Dennis Daniel was counting his blessings.

Three young men with ties to the River Valley area who went on a multicounty crime spree last weekend, ransacked the store late Saturday night. Stolen merchandise and damage to the building were estimated at more than $7,000.

Of the few things left untouched were, Daniel’s pizza ovens, a fryer, grill, microwaves, coffee machines and other cooking equipment.

“If they’d have come out here and destroyed this, it would have been horrible. We would have been down for more than just six hours,” Daniel said of his deli cooking area in a room behind the counter. “We do a lot of deli business, so it would have really devastated us.”

However, after discovering the mess on Sunday morning and waiting for police to gather evidence, it took six hours of work by himself, his wife Ruth and area volunteers to get the store operating.

“We lost all of our morning breakfast business, which is a decent amount, and didn’t open until 11:30 or 12 noon. It took my wife and Cindy Farrington and Darla Patenaude and my employee Rebecca Weston until 2 p.m. to get the store back in order,” Daniel said.

Another volunteer, Joe Young of Andover, brought in plywood and helped cover doors and broken windows.

“He helped us get on our feet and get the building back together, but it’s only temporarily repaired,” Daniel said.

Broken glass from four storefront and door windows and a beer cooler glass door was strewn throughout the store. Aisle shelves were overturned. Bags of potato chips, pastries and crackers were scattered all over. Counters were a mess.

Several cases of Budweiser and Michelob beer and Twisted Tea were gone from the vandalized beer cooler. Eighty percent of his cigarette stock was missing. Ice fishing equipment just set out for the season was stolen.

A lot of frozen deli goods were taken from several stand-up freezers lining one wall. Things such as bacon, boxes of steak, cheese sticks, sausages and pastries were all gone. Even live-bait night crawlers and all of his stock of strawberry Mentos were stolen.

“When my wife and I first got in here, our stomachs just dropped. We said, ‘My God! Look at the damage!’ You feel like you’ve been violated and want to just walk away from it, but you can’t. We were mad and ugly,” Daniel said.

Daniel spoke highly of Lewiston Sgt. Michael Parshall, the first officer to arrive, and Oxford County Lt. Christopher Wainwright and Rumford Detective Sgt. Daniel Garbarini. Parshall, who has a camp nearby, was working part time on Sunday for the Oxford County Sheriff’s Office.

“Mike asked me to sit down and think who might have been responsible and why, and I gave him a list of 10 people, and out of those, we hit the button on quite a few,” Daniel said.

But the one man he didn’t have, was the only one arrested, so far.

Scott B. Pike, 24, formerly of Rumford and now of Lewiston, was arrested Wednesday by Lewiston police and charged with theft by unauthorized taking.