The Crime: Motor vehicle burglary
The Victim: Augie Winnubst
Location: 9600 block of Rocky Branch
Date: Monday, July 2
Time: Around 4 a.m.
Augie Winnubst was asleep when crime came to call.
But that didn’t stop a criminal from looking through her unlocked cars and taking off with her new cell phone. When she woke up the next morning, she didn’t even realize anything had happened until her husband called.
“He called on his way to work and said the car had been rifled through,” she says. “But we never have anything in it, so I wasn’t worried.”
She checked the other car that had been sitting in the driveway that night, and found that someone had also gone through it. She didn’t think anything was missing until she realized she couldn’t find her cell phone.
“I wasn’t sure if it had been stolen or whether I just couldn’t find it,” Winnubst says. “So I went online to see if it had been used.”
That’s when she knew it had been stolen. The thief had made about 10 calls between 4 and 8 that morning. By logging onto her online account, Winnubst was able to see all the numbers that had been dialed. She decided to give them a call.
“I told them my phone had been stolen and asked who had called them,” she says. “They pretended they didn’t know what I was talking about. One guy said maybe his phone had been stolen, too.”
Winnubst deactivated the phone later that day and says she has learned her lesson. She now locks her car every night and tries to remember to take everything out of it.
“We have a Crime Watch, and I think maybe it gives you a sense of security,” she says. “Really, you just can’t be that reckless.”
Senior Corporal Ron Carpenter agrees that everyone needs to be careful because thieves will take the opportunity if you give it to them.
“The criminals are looking for the easy targets,” he says. “If at all possible, try to put your car in the garage. Second, make sure it’s locked. And third, don’t leave anything in the interior that would make someone want to break in. In this case, if they had looked in the car and not seen anything, they may have gone on down the street.”
But he says Winnubst did the right thing by canceling her cell phone service once she knew it had been stolen.
“If your phone has been stolen, I’d call 911 first to report it and then call your service to deactivate that phone because they’re going to make as many calls as they can as quickly as they can,” Carpenter says. “They know they only have a short window of opportunity before it stops working.” —BETHANY POLLER
