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Burglars busy with property crimes

by Dave Boyce

The last few weeks in the Almanac's circulation area have been busy ones for burglars and thieves, who made off with copper wire, a tile saw, a purse, and a lot of jewelry, according to reports from local law enforcement agencies.

Woodside

Burglars entered four homes in four different Woodside neighborhoods — on Neuman Lane, Skywood Way, Fox Hill Road and Fox Hollow Road — and stole jewelry from three of them, according to a March 28 report from the San Mateo County Sheriff's Office.

In the Neuman Lane, Skywood Way and Fox Hill Road incidents, the miscreants entered through unlocked doors and made off with "unknown amounts" of jewelry, deputies said. The Fox Hill Road case included theft of clothes and a Louis Vuitton bag.

Deputies expect the victims to be providing loss estimates soon to the Sheriff's Office, Lt. Larry Schumaker told the Almanac.

In the Fox Hollow Road incident, one or more burglars pried open a locked sliding glass door and ransacked dresser drawers for valuables but came up empty, according to a report of what the resident told investigators. The glass door will need about $300 in repairs.

Atherton

Atherton police reported three recent property crimes. On March 17 on Polhemus Avenue, police responded to an alarm and discovered a shattered window and missing jewelry valued at $3,200, Lt. Joe Wade of the Atherton Police Department said.

In a second incident on Polhemus Avenue five days later, a woman reported hearing a downstairs window being smashed while she was upstairs, and then footsteps running away after she yelled, "Who's there?"

Officers surrounded the home and called in a K-9 unit from the Sheriff's Office but found no one, Lt. Wade said.

A March 18 report described a scene at an Atherton Avenue residence of severed phone lines, a smashed second-story window in the master bedroom, and a section of ladder lying near a barbecue.

The resident reported nothing taken. Police suspect the burglar may have used the ladder section in combination with the barbecue to climb up the side of the house.

Menlo Park

In a grand theft case reported March 20, police said someone stole a Rolex watch valued at $8,000 from a home on Ringwood Avenue, the same day that someone stole a tile cutter, also valued at $1,800, from the bed of a pickup truck parked on Cotton Street.

Meanwhile, the next day at a downtown street corner, someone ransacked a car parked at Chestnut Street and Oak Grove Avenue, popped the trunk with a screwdriver, and stole a purse for a cumulative loss estimated at $1,800, police said.

On March 24, a man and a woman concealed "on their person" $1,000 in eyeglass frames and walked out of the LensCrafters store at 700 El Camino Real, police said.

According to a March 20 report, someone stole nine extension cords and 25 spools of copper wire with a total value of $5,200 from several locked storage boxes in a fenced-in area on Bohannon Drive, Menlo Park Police Department spokeswoman Nicole Acker said.

Police reported a March 19 incident on Bay Laurel Drive involving three suspects, one of whom forced open a front window and entered a residence while a second rang the doorbell and a third stayed in the vehicle. At one point, when the driver honked the horn "for an unknown reason," the other two suspects returned to the vehicle and the three of them drove off.