How to make an auto burglar wet his pants

I had quite the afternoon today.

I was just finishing up my daily jog late this afternoon when, as I turned into the parking lot of our apartment building, I saw a young guy standing at the left rear corner of my car trunk prying it open with a large multitool. The next few seconds happened without me even thinking about things, sort of an auto-pilot kind of thing.

I walked towards him and called out “What are you doing?”. He responded with something like “This is my friend’s car…” and then muttered something under his breath. I responded “That’s my car.” He looked pretty shocked at that point and just stood there for a second or two until I said “I think you should run now.”

He turned tail and took off, around my car, across the street, up over the grass at an adjacent apartment complex, and out of sight down into their parking area. I really wish I’d taken a cellcam pic of him, but he was gone before the camera application could even load.

Before he’d even cleared the median I was dialing 911 on my phone. I had just taken an infant/child/adult first aid and CPR refresher course earlier this week and, at the urging of the instructor, I had programmed my local emergency dispatch number into my cell phone so that a call from my cell would go straight to local emergency response rather than California Highway Patrol many miles away (what happens by default in northern California today if you call 911 from a mobile). Since I had the direct number programmed into my phone, I was talking with someone from local dispatch as the guy went out of sight just a few seconds later.

The local police had an undercover cop arriving in my location in about three minutes and he tore off in his SUV after the burglar. Two marked cars arrived a couple of minutes after that and started taking my statement. We looked at my car from across the parking lot but didn’t get closer because they wanted to use a canine unit if it was available to sniff for the thief’s trail. (Turns out that the canines didn’t come “on shift” until 5PM, whereas I caught the burglar at 4:30, and so they said unfortunately it would be too long for them to catch a scent so no dogs were used.)

As we were looking at the car, I noticed a yellow emergency supply/first aid pack which had been in my trunk was now lying against our apartment building, behind a shrub. I pointed this out to the officer taking my statement. He asked me to confirm it was mine and I did. Since they can’t get prints off of cloth anyway, he went ahead and had me look through it to verify everything was there (it was).

So at this point we knew the thief had been in the car at least once and gone through the pack, then went back (maybe to grab my lighter-powered tire pump, I don’t know, we didn’t really have anything valuable in there anyway, hah hah). He must have been surprised when the hatch fell on him the first time (the hatchback hydraulics are weak, always thought that was a problem but now I think it’s a feature :-), so he was having to try to get in again as I discovered him.

About the time we looked through the pack several more officers showed up. They were combing the area for the perpetrator (brownish-blond hair with a goatee, about 5ft 10in, white, probably early to mid-twenties, white tshirt with no logos, no discernible tatoos or scars, brownish cargo pants). They were also looking to see if he might have dropped his tool or anything else as he fled. Eventually the forensic van showed up. Photos and fingerprints were taken, and they got at least three good prints off of the left rear of the trunk. If they can pinpoint the guy that did it, apparently the fact that he removed the backpack from the car makes it a felony auto burglary so they can give him some decent time for it.

They have three possible suspects in mind, and one in particular that one of the policemen said matched my description very well and they’ve suspected might be breaking into cars in the area recently, too. They’re checking with other people whose apartments overlook the end of the building to see if anyone else might have seen anything and they said they might bring pictures by for me to look at them and try to pick him out.

I hope they catch him. In any case, I’m glad I interrupted him and, probably, gave him the shock of his thieving life!!!