Crime & Safety
Neighbors Stop Burglar in the Act
The sound of a window breaking prompts couple to action, as she calls police while he goes out to find himself confronting a criminal – and sends him packing.
An alert woman and her unflinching husband put a stop to a burglar who was in the process of breaking in to a neighbor's home when she heard breaking glass and he went to investigate.
At 8:23 p.m. July 14, the couple was at home in the 6600 block of Cedar Street, he downstairs watching TV, she upstairs. The man told police his wife shouted down to him that she'd heard glass breaking from the direction of their rear neighbor's property.
He called back to her to call police and headed out the back door. He saw a man standing at his neighbor's back door and putting on a T-shirt.
"Hey! What are you doing?" he shouted. The man at the door froze, staring at him, as he continued across his back yard. When he reached the gate in their back fence, the witness said, he looked down to find the latch, and when he looked up again, the man was gone.
The resident kept after him though, and shouted to another neighbor to join in the search, but they never got another sight of the burglar.
He described the suspect as black with a dark complexion, in his late teens to early 20s, 6 feet tall, with a thin build around 170 pounds and wearing shorts and a lighter-colored blue T-shirt.
Police found a window pane in the back door of the neighbor's home shattered and believe the burglar had wrapped his T-shirt around his hand to protect it when smashing out the window.
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Sign up for the Patch NewsletterTosa police briefly thought they had their man when a patrol officer soon spotted a man matching the description sitting on a bench at the bus stop at 68th Street and Wisconsin Avenue. He was wearing shorts and a white tank top but also had a blue T-shirt on around his neck.
He was stopped and questioned but denied any part in a burglary attempt and said he'd just gotten off work at 8:15 and gone directly to the bus stop.
Police called the employer he named, who confirmed the man worked for him and had just left, and officers also fetched the neighbor who had seen him. He said the man didn't look quite like the subject he'd seen, his shorts were different, and even the blue T was not the right shade – the one he'd seen was more of a teal color, he said.
Officers found no other evidence of the crime, such as cuts or shards of glass in the man's shirt, found his demeanor direct and credible, and released him.
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