Boys Chased Down, Arrested for Breaking into Car

As a wave of washes over Wauwatosa, at least one case was solved late last week.

According to Wauwatosa police:

At 11:57 p.m. Friday, two 16-year-old Milwaukee boys were arrested for theft from a vehicle, prowling and violating curfew after they fled and then were caught with a stolen GPS unit when two police officers in an unmarked squad car tried to question them.

The officers saw the two boys walking north on 68th Street near Meineke Avenue after curfew. When one of the officers identified himself as a police officer, the boys ran off through a yard in the 2300 block of North 68th.

That officer, in the passenger’s seat, jumped out and chased the boys while the officer who was driving went around the block to cut them off, also calling for more units to back them up.

The officer on foot saw the boys cross Meineke and run into a yard in the 2400 block of North 67th Street. He lost sight of them behind a fence, but while climbing over it he heard a muffled voice and soon found the two boys lying behind an SUV parked in the driveway.

One of the boys had the GPS in his pocket, and the other was wearing latex gloves. They told officers where they had stolen the unit and it was returned to its owner. They had rifled the car and found it in the glove box.

Retracing his steps with a flashlight to see if the boys had dropped any other articles, the officer who ran them down found only one thing: another latex glove.

The boys told officers they had never entered cars before and had only done it on a whim when they noticed a car with a rear window rolled halfway down.

OK, said the police, but what about those gloves?

The boys insisted they had just happened to find sets of latex gloves in the car they were robbing and “thought it would be cool to put them on.”

Their arrest Friday did not by any means put a stop to widespread incidents of thefts from vehicles. Numerous reports Sunday of cars being entered or broken into Saturday night led police to .