St. Louis police say they are on the tail of a midnight menace—a bold thief breaking into occupied homes and in one case even stealing items from a bedroom while the homeowner was asleep in bed.
St. Louis Metropolitan Police spokesman Mitch McCoy says the department believes the same individual is behind four burglaries—and one attempted burglary—beginning last Wednesday and occurring on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. The four burglaries happened in Soulard, Compton Heights and Skinker-Debaliviere. In one case, a barking dog scared the thief off.
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McCoy said that the burglaries primarily occurred between 1 and 4 a.m. and that electronics seem to be a primary target for the thief, though in one case he made off with a car from a shed. (The vehicle was later recovered.) He is believed to be carrying bolt cutters and at least in some of the cases entering through windows and exiting through doors.
“It is incredibly terrifying that someone would go to this length breaking into multiple homes and in one of these cases go into a victim’s bedroom,” says McCoy.
Given the string of burglaries, McCoy said that some calls related to suspicious persons are being elevated in priority when they come in. Early Sunday morning, police responded with a canine unit to a call for a suspicious person in Compton Heights. A dog hit on the suspect’s scent and followed it across Grand to the Shaw neighborhood, where the trail went cold.
McCoy said at a press conference Monday that police are encouraging city residents not to sleep with their windows open and to be on the lookout for any suspicious activity in their neighborhoods: “It’s OK to be nosy right now. It’s going to take a vigilant person, and that nosy neighbor.”
Police have released numerous photographs from surveillance video of the suspect, a man with a prominent pot belly and salt-and-pepper beard. At that same Monday press conference, McCoy implied that the police may have an inkling as to his identity. Asked if the department had a suspected identity of the man in the photo, McCoy replied that no identity had been confirmed.
He expressed confidence that police would make an arrest. “He will be in custody very soon,” he said.
