The Crime: Burglary
The Victim: Curtis Ideker
Location: 9900 block of Rustleleaf
Date: Saturday, Aug. 25
Time: 10:30 p.m.
For criminals, leaving the scene of the crime is usually advisable.
But in Lake Highlands, one burglar seems to have not received the memo.
The path for a clean get-away was wide open. The burglar found an open garage door, and inside were two bicycles. The burglar took both, giving him ample means of escape. When Lake Highlands resident Curtis Ideker realized he’d been robbed, which may have been a significant amount of time after the crime took place, he called police, who took about three hours to arrive at his home. Despite all this, however, the bikes were easily recovered.
According to the police report, responding officer Clayton Woods was on his way to Ideker’s house when he saw a man riding down the street on which the crime had taken place. The man had two bikes. He thought nothing of it at the time, but when Woods was told that two bikes were among the items stolen, he jumped back into his cruiser to track down the man he’d seen earlier, which he accomplished with relative ease.
The suspect managed to escape Woods on foot, but the bikes were recovered.
“The officer got to my house, heard I’d lost some bikes, and just took right back off after them,” Ideker says. “About 15 minutes later, I got a call that the bikes were on their way back to my house.”
Though the bikes were recovered, Ideker says other stolen items were not, namely some cleaning and landscaping equipment and the food in his garage fridge, which included trout fillets from a recent fishing trip, frozen lasagna and Gatorade.
Woods wrote in his report that the suspect with the bikes didn’t have any additional property with him, leading Woods to assume that another criminal may have been involved.
“They may have stashed all the property somewhere nearby,” says Sr. Cpl. Jason Sibley. “I’ve seen it happen. They get a few garages, stash the property somewhere, and have another suspect come by with a vehicle and pick it up.”
Sibley says the recovery of stolen property typically does not happen this easily, and property owners should be taking precautions anyway. Specifically, he says people should keep a list of the serial numbers of valuable items, such as bicycles. This enables the police to scour pawn shops for the items.
Though his bikes were returned to him unscathed, Ideker says he doesn’t expect the same for the rest of the stolen property.
“I doubt I’ll be getting anything else back,” Ideker says. “I don’t think I’m going to be seeing those trout fillets again.”
