Police Report: Update on Crime in Wauwatosa

A week doesn't pass without at least a couple of reports of runaways from the Carmelite Home for Boys on Kavanaugh Place.

Nothing comes of most of those reports — the boys show up later, or at least they don't show up in another police report. But this latest incident left us wondering who's minding the store.

At 2:30 a.m. Friday, a 16-year-old boy was arrested for violating curfew after he was reported as a runaway from the home at 1214 Kavanaugh Pl. A school official said the boy left at 1:45 p.m. and not returned.

She also said that he had walked away from the school every day since May 31, but had always returned before midnight. She said the boy had been sent there from his home in Madison but seemed to have made some friends in Wauwatosa.

Police found the boy walking over the footbridge in the Village at that hour of the morning. He had a purple and black Nikon Coolpix S3000 digital camera and because of a rash of recent entry-to-auto reports, officers checked records but found no reports of a camera of that description being stolen.

The boy was allowed to keep the camera. Officers said the boy’s speech was slurred and labored, and when asked, he admitted to having smoked K2, a synthetic marijuana.

The boy said he was unaware of the curfew ordinance that prohibits anyone younger than 17 from being on the streets from 11 p.m. to 5 a.m.

He was turned back over to Carmelite staff.

Also in the recent Tosa police reports:

Tuesday

At 10:17 p.m., a man smashed the glass front door of , 11104 W. Blue Mound Rd., and stole four bottles of fruit-flavored white Zinfandel worth $27.96. Video footage showed a man wearing a hockey mask and a hooded sweatshirt using a hammer to break the glass.

At 9:09 p.m., police were called to Home Depot, 4100 N. 124th St., when video footage showed a man and woman leaving the store earlier in the day without paying for four spools of wire worth $717.20. The man, a 45-year-old from Eagle, was arrested Wednesday by Milwaukee police when he was caught trying to steal from another Home Depot store there and confessed to the Wauwatosa theft as well. The woman was not with him and is not in custody.

At 2 p.m., a 52-year-old Milwaukee man was arrested for retail theft at after he was caught trying to leave the store with concealed merchandise worth $139.50. He had seven packages of underwear in a bag

Monday

At 3:12 p.m., a Butler woman reported that someone had smashed out a window in her car and stolen her purse from it while it was parked in the parking structure at , 2421 N. Mayfair Rd., where she works. Surveillance video showed that at 12:40 p.m., a car pulled in to the structure, a man got out and began looking in cars, then smashed the woman’s window and stole the purse, but the camera was too far from the scene to offer a description.

At 12:45 p.m., a resident of the 6000 block of West Vliet St. reported that two unlocked bicycles, together worth $500, had been stolen from his back porch.

At 9:44 p.m., police responded to an automatic alarm at a residence in the 2000 block of Ludington Avenue to find that someone had tried to burglarize the home by breaking a window. The owners said that the alarm sounds very loudly at the home, which probably scared off the would-be intruder. Police noted that the window had been taped before it was broken. The window was close enough to the side door that someone could have reached in and opened it. Nothing was missing from the home.

At 6 a.m., a resident of an apartment in the 7200 block of West Center Street reported that someone had stolen his minivan from his parking space behind the building.

 Sunday

At 9:03 p.m., a 27-year-old Milwaukee man was arrested and a known 27-year-old Bayside man was being sought after they tried to steal scrap metal from Alro Steel, 3000 N. 114th St. An employee had seen the men enter the property and thought they were going to steal metal, a chronic problem at the business. The man who was arrested said a second pair of men were already at the bins behind the business stealing metal when they arrived. His accomplice had gotten scared and left on foot, he said. Wauwatosa police were seeking the other suspects based on his and the witness' descriptions.