Winnona Park Car Thief Caught
Decatur Metro | September 9, 2009Recent car thief victim, Allison, writes in to report that the thief who had been stealing from unlocked cars in the Winnona Park in the last week or so, has been caught.
Last evening I received a call from Sgt. Jennifer Ross of the Decatur Police. They arrested a man yesterday afternoon for the thefts occurring throughout our neighborhood this week and last. The arrest was based on serial numbers of items taken, which were reported. Sgt. Ross ran them against a database of serial numbers from pawn shops, and lo and behold, our thief had attempted to pawn the items. So he was arrested and will be prosecuted.
Sgt. Ross also said that the reports of entered autos—even in the cases where nothing or items of little value were taken—will help the prosecutors in their case against him.
Hats off to Decatur Police Department—this is community policing at its best!
Hats off indeed.
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It is so important to record the serial numbers of stuff that is valuable to you. I guess most people already know that, but we really regretted not having the serial numbers of many items that were stolen from our house during a break-in several years ago.
Even kids’ bikes. They do turn up sometimes!
There’s a national bike registry easy to find on-line that is only $10 for something like 10 years. Now the one time one of our bikes was stolen at Piedmont Park, the bike was never recovered. But it felt satisfying giving the police report to the registry and knowing that all the data was on file.
Some good information regarding proactive use of a bike registery.
In addition to the registry you mentioned, there is also a global BikeRegistry on the net that allows one to register & TAG his/her whole fleet of bikes for FREE to aid in the recovery in the event of theft.
Global and free? Wow! Of course, if they find our bike halfway around the world, it might cost more than the bike’s worth to retrieve it. Sure hope the thieves dump the bike in Tahiti or the Greek coast!
Glad I didn’t buy that iPod for $20 that guy tried to sell me outside the pawn shop!
OK, let’s compare:
Items stolen from an automobile –
Atlanta PD = call in and get a case number
Decatur PD = arrest
No comparison, mon frere. None!
Seems there was some more criminal activity in Winnona Park last night. From the WP group:
Sometime late last night or early this morning, a car was stolen on the 100 block of Shadowmoor; the victim had left the car unlocked. Also, during the same period, the CITGO station on the corner of Commerce and E. College was burglarized. The theives somehow jimmied the window behind the ice machine outside and they ran off with the store’s suppply of cigarettes.
Winnona Park is normally a safe neighborhood so incidents like this are very disturbing. Let’s keep an eye out for each other; we can’t watch 24 hours a day but always call the police if you see or hear anything suspicious. I’d rather they investigate and find nothing wrong then to ignore it and find out that a crime has been committed.