Vehicle Burglary Raises Questions About Better Safety

An Eagle Rock resident whose vehicle was burgled Saturday is hoping that the LAPD will step up patrols in the neighborhood and that City authorities will install better lighting on his street as well as prune some out-of-control shrubbery on the sidewalk that appears to have provided cover to the burglar.

The resident, Ted H. (he does not wish to provide his full last name), lives on the 2300 block of Laverna Avenue, near Ellenwood Drive. He was getting into his Jeep Grand Cherokee at around 7 a.m. on June 9 when he noticed that the rear passenger side window was smashed.

Large chunks of glass lay on the seat nearby. “The first thing I looked for was my iPhone—a 32-gig iPhone 4,” Ted told Patch, explaining that he usually kept it inside the vehicle’s center console, between the driver’s seat and the front passenger seat.

The phone, which Ted says he purchased in the summer of 2011 for $650, was gone. However, an iPad case that he bought as a gift for his young nephew lay untouched nearby. The burglar, Ted believes, had no use for it.

But why leave an iPhone in such circumstances, thereby effectively ignoring the well-known law enforcement advice not to leave valuables in vehicles?

“I have a factory alarm [in the vehicle]—upgraded to a hyper alarm, and I was sure it would have gone off,” Ted says, adding: “The burglar got lucky.”

Ted figures that neither he nor his neighbor, in front of whose house the vehicle was parked, heard the Jeep’s alarm. The suspect evidently climbed into the vehicle through the window and did not open any of the vehicle’s doors, which might have set off the alarm.

The burglar appears to have been injured, however, apparently while trying to loosen pieces of glass in the Jeep’s window. The glass, Ted reckons, did not collapse during the break-in, as is often the case, but was held together instead by tinting film.

According to Ted, blood was smeared on the passenger seat (see photo), along with what appeared to be the burglar’s footprints. A detective at the Northeast Community Station took a sample of the blood, says Ted, after a technician downtown at the LAPD station on Los Angeles Street was unable to find any fingerprints of the suspect inside the vehicle.

“We don’t know if the thief was wearing gloves,” says Ted.

The LAPD “needs to beef up patrols and we need more street lights,” says Ted, adding that a prolific shrub planted on his stretch of Laverna enables burglars to “conceal themselves behind the branches.”

The plants, says Ted, have not been pruned in the two years that he has lived there.