Some of you who have been around a while may, or may not, remember a tale I related about 2 thieves who hauled a disabled truck off of someone’s property and dragged it 3 miles to a recycler. A neighbor had seen them leaving and called the cops who found scrape marks in the asphalt due to a blown tire. The cops just followed the trail to the recycler where they arrested the pair for auto theft…
Apparently these idiots have relatives. On the local news tonight it’s reported that a car caught on fire and burnt to the ground on the side of the roadway.
This charred hulk was apparently towed with burned off tires and also left trails gouged in the asphalt.
The cops followed the trail to a property where they found a stolen pickup and of all things; an illegal moonshine still. The suspect has not been arrested as of yet…
I guess scrap metal prices going up and the downward trend of public school quality, is a bad combination. Most are looking for easy money. Not much thought put into anything, even stealing stuff.
In the general vicinity of where I live, some idiot robbed a house and took two bronze sculptures, valued at about $10K to a local scrap metal recycler. The recycler realized something was amiss and turned over the guy’s name and the sculptures to the police. It turned out he was the guy taking care of the house for the people that were on vacation.
When my grandfather was alive, his home was burglarized by the trash that was renting the house next door. It was just after a snowstorm. The police followed the footprints from the broken basement window, down the alley to the carryout, then back to the house next door.
When I was stationed in Maine during my Air Force career…I read about two bozos who robbed a pizza place and made a quick getaway. The cops just followed their footprints in the fresh snow to a house about two hundred yards away and broke in the back door. The dummies were found counting the money on the kitchen table with the pizza place bank bag in plain sight. As they were being placed in the police car for the ride downtown…the mother of the two protested all the while that her sons were innocent.
We had one of those brain trusts in NH who robbed a Convenient store at about 2am. The police arrived and the idiot ran into the woods. But he was wearing those type of sneakers that when you walk they light up. So every time he moved…the police were able to see him.
I had a colleague, a single woman who was in her 50s at the time who had her kitchen appliances and furniture stolen from her house while she was out of town. They caught the thief–the man had been doing work in her neighborhood. He was caught by the police when he was wheeling her refrigerator on a hand truck with a for sale sign on the refrigerator past the police station at high noon.
http://www.marionstar.com/article/20111229/NEWS01/111229006/
A local electronics store was burglarized and set on fire not that long ago. Like previous posts here, they followed the footprints in the snow to the apartment buildings behind the store and arrested the people inside.
You have to kind of feel sorry for these folks. What else would they do? Last week a couple black guys came into a Mexican restaurant close to closing time. They didn’t buy anything, just looked around little. Next morning the safe was missing from the office. They used a chair to roll it out. Owner says the safe was empty. Sheriff is now looking for a couple black guys driving and older BMW that sags a little in the back.
A year or so ago, the wire theive hit one of the power companies I think. At any rate they had some heavy coils of wire. They couldn’t get it all in the car so they strapped it on the outside. Deputy saw the coils strapped on the car and pulled them over.
Then the guy from out of town that grabbed demo diamond ring from the jewelry store and took off thinking it was a $5000 ring as labeled. Caught the guy 30 miles away but it was only a $50 glass copy. Worse part is they can be charged for the $5000 because they thought it was worth that.
Then the Mexicans that hoisted a big screen TV out of Walmart on camera. Police said it was still in the box after tracking the car down at a trailer park. Watch for cameras I guess or maybe go to another town.
Then my favorite as told before was the guy that was held up making a drug deal. Got mad at the guys and called the police because they didn’t pay him for the pot. All three were arrested.
So the socialists really do have a point. Some of these folks just need 24/7 protection.
Sometimes it’s the honest – or maybe semi-honest in this case – that gets involved in a sketchy deal and that gets taken and made to look foolish, rather than the actual perp . Con man scams and the like. A common scam which occurs around Christmas time here in the SF Bay area goes like this: A shopper is leaving the mall, walking to his car in the parking lot, near closing time. Someone unknown to the shopper approaches, holding a large rectangular flattish heavy-looking cardboard box, and asks if the shopper wants to buy a flat screen tv. He’s on the way to return it or something, is his excuse. Then he opens the end of the box to show a side panel saying “40 Inch Sony LED Flat Screen TV”. The shopper says “how much”, and the guy says “It’s getting heavy, if you pay cash I’ll take $250”. the shopper picks it up, seems heavy as would be expected for a TV, and pays up. As you might expect, this doesn’t end well. The shopper gets home only to find inside is just a couple sheets of plywood.
A local ring of thieves were stripping copper wire and pipes from houses listed for sale or visibly vacant in broad daylight in a very nice neighborhood. White panel van, work shirts and NO ONE paid any attention until they popped about 50 houses and the cops caught them cruising a neighborhood.
Reminds me of when GM redesigned their full size van and tested on the streets of Phoenix with a plumbing logo on the side. No one took a “spy” photo before release. Hidden in plain sight!
BTW, this is a horrible crime. The cost to repair is in the 10’s of thousands for the couple hundred the thieves get.
A local ring of thieves were stripping copper wire and pipes from houses listed for sale or visibly vacant in broad daylight in a very nice neighborhood. White panel van, work shirts and NO ONE paid any attention until they popped about 50 houses and the cops caught them cruising a neighborhood.
In NH a few years ago…we had a couple of brain trusts decide they wanted to steal copper. So they thought to get the most for their efforts was a small transfer station. 15,000 volts going through one’s body kinda burns it nice and crispy. Took them a few days to identify the bodies.
@MikeInNH, Normally I’d not be in favor of the death penalty for stealing copper but these folks work at the intersection of Karma and Stupid. A little chlorine in the gene pool.
We have problems with squirrels completing circuits and causing power outages. A few years ago the power company workers found a couple of copper thief crispy critters. I think they were featured in Darwin awards.
Near a small city south of me a few years ago someone stole a 1/4 mile of underground cable which the phone company had laid just a few days before.
Someone apparently took a pickup, connected a chain to the cables at the terminal box, and drove off.
The ground was still soft and unpacked so they motored away, pulling the cable out of the dirt, until the truck started bogging down. At that point they cut the cables and disappeared…
I used to work for a company that owned a few hundred restaurant franchises. One night someone broke into one of them, attached a chain or some kind of strap to the safe in the front of the store (these safes weighed about 500 lbs and could be bolted to the floor, but no one ever bothered), and used a truck of some kind to drag the safe from the front of the store all the way out the back door. They got away with it, and caused a lot of damage to the interior of the store–the safe smashed into and destroyed or damaged several walls on its transit through the store.
Another restaurant unit had some thieves try to steal a 400 lb commercial mixer. This mixer stood about 4.5’ high and was not the easiest thing to move, to say the least. The thieves apparently got spooked and dropped it in the parking lot. The theft was discovered the next morning when the abandoned mixer was found in the side parking lot. Unfortunately they’d dropped it, cracking the cast aluminum base, and essentially destroying it. The thieves were never found, though it was speculated that a rival restaurant had tried to steal it. The same restaurant was shut down after corporate realized that it literally was robbed or burglarized at least once a month. Nice neighborhood.
W/R/T the safe heist: do you think it was an “inside job?” It sounds like a current or former employee from how you tell it.
About a decade or so ago, somebody made off with an ATM (one of the big, outdoor models that weighs several tons and is housed in a small shed-like building.) They stole a front-end loader to rip it out if the ground and toss it the pickup bed.
It was total fail: the pickup suffered frame damage, and the cutting torch they used damaged most of the loot…
The other big ATM heist around here involved a PNC employee who worked honestly and diligently for long enough to be entrusted with restocking a bunch of ATMs…at which point he simply left town!
I heard about one yesterday. Apparently a couple of guys would promise the families of inmates that for a fee, they could get their loved ones sentences commuted or reduced. Then they ran off with the money and never doing anything. Now they will be doing time with their victims. Who says there is no justice.
Probably the dumbest ones I’ve seen on a local level were the 2 who decided to steal gas from all of the vehicles in a farmer’s barn one day while no one was at home.
The resulting blaze was estimated at a 200K dollar loss and wiped out the barn, a couple of ATVs, a late model pickup, a 2-ton bobtail, and a '67 Corvette 427 Roadster.
All because these 2 decided to hold a cigarette lighter up to a saddle tank to check the gasoline level.
Both were arrested later, charged with arson, and both suffered burned forearms.
It still amazes me that someone could slosh gasoline all over, have the place reeking with fumes, and fire up a lighter without pondering for one second, “what if”.
