Another Highlands Home Burglarized for Car Keys

When a juvenile was arrested July 8 at the wheel of a car stolen a week earlier after a burglary in Wauwatosa, he swore he hadn't taken it but was borrowing it from a friend.

When another car was stolen Sunday in the same neighborhood – and again after the home was entered and the car keys stolen – the Wauwatosa police were leaning toward believing the boy's story.

They even checked with Juvenile Detention and learned he was still in custody and couldn't have been involved in the second and possibly related incident.

On June 30, also a Sunday, a 2005 Honda Pilot was stolen out of the driveway of a home in the 6500 block of Washington Circle, in the Washington Highlands. It vanished during 20 minutes around noon while the woman of the house was in and out doing some gardening.

This past Sunday, a family in the 1500 block of Martha Washington Drive, also in the Washington Highlands, found that a purse, two cell phones and the keys to their 2006 Toyota Highlander had disappeared during an 18-minute span while they were in the home.

Then they discovered the SUV was missing from the driveway.

The only differences were the time of day and that this time, other property had been stolen as well.

The couple and their two young daughters had come home about 10:30 that evening and gone to the basement to watch a movie together. The woman said she'd been up and down stairs several times fetching snacks and drinks, and at 10:48 noticed the missing property, which had been on a kitchen counter.

The front door and a side door had been locked, but the back door wasn't. She found the screen door propped open with a sleeping bag that had been inside the back door. Other than that, nothing had been disturbed and not a sound was heard.

Police tried to trace one of the phones through its iCloud account and were led toward an address on North 40th Street just south of Lloyd Street. The phone was turned off before they arrived.

The family members at the home, interviewed separately, all gave parallel statements that everyone had been home for hours and no one had visited.

The woman of the house told officers that it was the second time this had happened recently – a couple of months ago, she said, Milwaukee police officers had "barged in" and demanded a stolen phone they had traced by GPS.

But a thorough search turned up no phone then, and Wauwatosa police this time accepted that the family was telling the truth and did not conduct a search.

More likely, it appears, a thief or thieves, knowing certain phones can be traced, is leaving them on for a short time, taking them to the same place and turning them off before moving on, to draw police to the wrong location.

Police had no suspects and little evidence as of latest report, and the Highlander had not been recovered.