Police Collect Evidence in Advance, Arrest 3 in Burglary

Wauwatosa police got a rare opportunity last week to quickly put the collar on three suspected burglars when, through a series of fortunate events, they were able to collect most of the evidence they would need before the actual burglary had even been reported.

How does that work?

• An alert witness got the license number of a vehicle Saturday night when he reported two men he thought were trying to enter cars in a motel/restaurant parking lot.
• A patrol officer spotted the vehicle less than an hour later, pulled it over and saw that the occupants had some suspicious property in the back – a tangle of loose lengths of electrical wire and boxes of drywall powder. He confiscated the drywall compound and photographed the rest before releasing them.
• When the burglary of a home under construction was reported Monday, police quickly noted that the missing property exactly matched what had been seen in the vehicle early Sunday morning and apprehended the well-known suspects.

According to police reports:

At 11:43 p.m. Saturday, officers were called to Blue Mound Gardens, 11703 Blue Mound Road, by a manager who said two men were trying the door handles of cars in the parking lot. The men were gone when police arrived, but the witness gave officers a license number and description of their vehicle – an older, black Jeep Grand Cherokee.

A short time later, at 12:34 a.m. Sunday, a patrol officer spotted the Jeep turning onto Blue Mound Road from North 107th Street. He pulled it over and found that it contained four boxes of drywall compound, a tangle of electrical wire, linesman's pliers, a hammer, a flashlight, two hatchets and latex gloves – along with three well-known faces.

"I am very familiar with all three subjects," the officer wrote in his report. "I have interviewed all three subjects over the course of the last year in connection to other burglary, robbery, theft, POCS (possession of a controlled substance) and possession of stolen merchandise reports."

He went on to report that all three were known opiate addicts, citing Oxycone, benzodiazepines, Suboxone and heroin among the drugs they were known to abuse.

Also, the license plates belonged to a different vehicle. The three men, two from Tosa and one from Milwaukee, plus a 17-year-old Milwaukee girl along for the ride, were questioned separately. All gave different stories about the origin of the drywall compound, so it was confiscated for safekeeping until the real owner could be found, and everything was photographed.

The only probable cause the officer had in stopping the men was suspicion of trying to enter unlocked cars – with no evidence that any cars had actually been entered. The men denied they had even been trying cars and had no property with them that might likely have come from a motel or restaurant guest.

Besides, they had an all-too-believable alibi for roaming the Blue Mound Gardens property – they had been "on a shorts run." That's down-and-out lingo for scavenging ashtrays outside businesses for half-smoked cigarettes.

The officer noted that he couldn't really doubt the men because on a number of earlier occasions when he had questioned them, they had their pockets filled with other people's cigarette butts.

Burglary a big headache for builder

At 11:19 a.m. Monday, police were dispatched to the scene of a break-in at a house being constructed in the 10600 block of West Wisconsin Avenue – just about two blocks from where the Jeep had been stopped early the morning before. Someone had smashed out a window, reached in and unlatched it, climbed through and gone looking for anything of value.

Besides four boxes of drywall compound that had gone missing, in the basement the building's owner/contractor and police found that the business end of all the home's wiring – about 6- to 8-foot lengths of all the wiring in the home that would have been routed to a junction box – had been cut off at the conduits.

The whole house had already been drywalled, meaning that the whole house would now have to be cut into and rewired and the drywall repaired or replaced where necessary.

However, it took almost no time for officers and detectives to connect the missing construction materials with the drywall compound stored at the police station and the wiring in the photos of the back of the Jeep. The builder even paid a visit and identified the boxed drywall compound as identical to his missing stock.

The dog will bite

At about 5 p.m. Monday, officers went to the home of one of the suspects in the 12000 block of West Cathedral Avenue. The reporting officer – a different one than quoted above – noted that he knew all of the suspects stayed regularly at the address, and added, "I am familiar with the three suspects from having multiple prior contacts with each of them."

When a platoon of officers arrived, it happened that two of the suspects, one of them the resident, were walking up to the door of the house. Police knocked and the resident suspect answered, and was promptly arrested. He told officers that the second suspect was resting on a couch in the basement.

Police went to the basement and saw no one on a couch or elsewhere. Rather than conduct a tedious and perhaps dangerous search, they turned to the ace up their sleeve – K9 Officer Addy.

"Come out or the dog will be sent in, and he will bite you!" called Addy's keeper, and the second suspect quickly stood up from his hiding place behind a bar. He was ordered out and arrested, and then a peek behind the bar revealed the third suspect, along with the 17-year-old girl.

Keys to the Jeep and a brown jacket covered in drywall dust were recovered from the house.

Affidavits seeking charges of burglary were forwarded to the office of the Milwaukee County District Attorney against two Wauwatosa men, 22 and 23 years old, and a 29-year-old man from the west side of Milwaukee.