Crime & Safety

Car Thieves Make a Strange Getaway

When a witness inadvertently misleads a police officer, the officer inadvertently overlooks a vehicle's stolen status, and while his back is turned, thieves return to steal it again.

Sometimes things are not quite what they seem, as a well-meaning citizen and a officer learned Monday night when at least a couple of car thieves, and maybe as many as four, slipped away in a baffling series of comings and goings.

In the end, one vehicle got stolen twice, one got broken into and pillaged, two more remain a mystery, and nobody got caught – even though the last act of the crime was carried out within shouting distance of the police officer.

At 10:52, a resident of the apartments, 4726 N. 100th St., reported he was watching a man entering cars in the parking lot.

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He said he had seen a man walk away from a silver minivan stopped at the far end of the lot and approach another parked minivan and open its door. Then, he said, the man went to another car, a convertible with the top up, opened it and got inside.

The witness said he heard banging noises from the car and called police. He told the dispatcher the suspect was a black male, about 18 years old, 5 feet 10 inches tall, 150 pounds and wearing a gray hoodie and black baseball cap.

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By the time he got the call in, though, the suspect had gone back to the waiting minivan, gotten in the passenger door, and was driven away by a man at the wheel whom the witness could not describe.

While other squads searched without success for that vehicle, the police officer who responded at the scene found that the door locks had been punched out of both vehicles the suspect had been seen entering, and the in-dash stereo had been wrenched out of the convertible.

The officer noted the license numbers so that dispatchers could seek contact information for the owners, presumably both residents or visitors at the apartments. Then he started checking all the cars in the extensive lots for more possible break-ins.

Making off with the evidence

When the officer reached the opposite end of the complex, the same witness called again to say that two men had just showed up in a dark-colored sedan with a headlight out and pulled up next to the same minivan that had been entered earlier. The passenger had gotten out, gotten into the van, started it up, and both vehicles left before the officer could return.

The officer quickly ran the plate number he had taken and learned that this minivan had not belonged at the apartments in the first place – it had been stolen earlier in the evening in Milwaukee.

A second area search turned up none of the now three suspect vehicles on the loose. Officers reviewed surveillance camera footage and found, as they had begun to suspect, that their witness had missed the crucial first moments of the unfolding crime.

Both minivans, of similar make, model and color, had entered he lot, not a half a minute apart, and the first had parked and gone dark before the witness noticed anything.

The main suspect had actually been driving that first van and had gone to the second when it arrived, perhaps to deliver some message or retrieve something. The witness' account began only when he saw the man return to the van he had in fact arrived in.

From that point, the video showed substantially what the witness had described. In the dark and at a distance, the video could not provide police a description of any of the suspects or the license numbers of the unidentified van or the dark sedan.

At this time, police have no suspects and postulated no theories on why the first two men would seem to have abandoned one minivan, and why then they or perhaps two other suspects would have returned so soon, in yet another vehicle, to grab it again.


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