The Victim: Sean Langford

The Crime: Burglary of a motor vehicle

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Date: Monday, April 29

Time: Between midnight and 9 a.m.

Location: 9300 block of Larchwood

Someone burglarized the car.

By day, Sean Langford has a pretty cool job at Green Grass Studios producing visual effects and animation. But the crime on the night of April 29 was no special effect. It was reality — and knowing someone has rifled through your stuff gives you a pretty sick feeling.

Langford and his wife had just returned home that Sunday night after spending the weekend away with family members. After unpacking, they may have forgotten to lock the car doors. In the early-morning hours, someone opened the car and found his wife’s wallet, which she had forgotten to take inside, in the center console. While this was a bit disheartening and a pain, the crime could have been worse.

“My wife initially thought she left her laptop in there and was freaking out,” Langford says. “Luckily I had taken it out the night before without telling her.”

Dallas Police Sgt. Keitric Jones of the Northeast Patrol Division says it is always important for residents to remember to remove absolutely anything of value from a vehicle. Anything can cause a criminal to break in.

“A locked door or a clean interior is often enough to deter someone from entering your car and rummaging around,” he says. “It may be inconvenient to lock or unlock the door if you are only going to be away for a moment, but it is more inconvenient and costly to replace a window, stereo, GPS, etc.”

 

Serious work, amusing award

Police breakfast: Photo by Danny Fulgencio

Police breakfast: Photo by Danny Fulgencio

Neighborhood resident and activist Bill Vandivort II hosted an appreciation breakfast for Northeast Division police last month at Chubby’s in Lake Highlands. Several officers, including Police Chief David Brown (a former northeast commander) and new commander Deputy Chief Andrew Acord attended. Vandivort presented Brown with “The Kitchen Sink Award,” an actual kitchen sink, reasoning that the capture of the suspected Lake Highlands serial rapist required police to “throw everything including the kitchen sink” at the manhunt. An inside joke, the kitchen-sink idiom reportedly is an old favorite of Brown’s.