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Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
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Thieves broke into and burglarized six vehicles parked at the informal dirt parking area at the Alpine Road intersection with Piers Lane between 9:30 and 10:15 a.m. Thursday morning (Sept. 22), according to an account from Menlo Park resident Jeff Jonker, whose car was broken into.
The lot is convenient for people hiking the trails near The Dish, the radio-telescope antenna on undeveloped Stanford University land that overlooks Interstate 280.
None of the broken windows in the burglarized vehicles faced the street, which was busy with weekday morning traffic, Mr. Jonker told the Almanac.
“A whole bunch of laptops were stolen,” he said. A spokesman for the San Mateo County Sheriff’s Office did not immediately return the Almanac’s phone call.
Of the five victims, one noted that a stolen purse contained a passport, a set of keys and at least $1,000 in various forms of cash.
I’m always amazed at what people leave in their cars, laptops, cash? When I do the Dish or Sawyer Camp trail, I bring just my license & hide it.
A laptop in plain view in a car, a drug addict needing money fast, a steel pipe wrapped in a towel, and there you are.
It may be that one or more of the victims was unwise and left a laptop or purse in full view – the article does not say that. If six cars were broken into, it seems unlikely that all were advertising ‘break me, take me’, as in general the community knows we’re urbanizing, and the more secure days of yore are gone. Nonetheless. downgrading this location from ‘relatively safe and convenient’ to ‘don’t park here’ = another step down in the quality of life on the Peninsula.