DPD: How we caught the Greenland Hills garage burglars

The DPD is still cleaning up the mess created by the Greenland Hills garage burglars after their arrest on Wednesday morning. In addition to the two burglars and a juvenile accomplice, they also discovered a fencing operation for the stolen goods.

DPD Northeast's Deputy Chief Jan Easterling sent this summary of events to BD late Wednesday evening...

DPD has been using covert officers to try and catch the guys hitting the garages on 211's beat, particularly in the Greenland Hills Neighborhood area. Last night/early this (Wednesday) morning (4:30 am), we were very successful. Covert officers spotted some suspects, sat back and watched.

The suspects hit a garage in the 5400 block of McCommas. We saw them going in between a few houses and then caught them with the property coming out. We weren't sure of which house they hit so we had to wake up a few neighbors on the street to get them to check their garages. All the awakened neighbors were very excited to see DPD was out there and happy we had caught someone. We found our complainant and his property was returned to him.

After getting three people in custody, we were able to determine a fencing location in the Central DPD Division. We entered that location and found a bunch of stolen property. We also encountered numerous people coming to that location with property to sell or looking to buy. We secured statements from four persons stating this is a known fencing location.

Some things found there definitely belong to a complainant on Morningside and other items believed to belong to other complainants in that neighborhood. We are in the process of calling in complainants to identify property, return property, and to look at lineups since some have seen the suspect.

As a result of this investigation, we were able to make two arrests, one adult male and one adult female - and a juvenile male who was also with them - for the burglary this morning and the other offenses we expect to clear.

We also are filing on a person at the fencing house for receiving and concealing stolen property. DPD Detectives and Deployment officers are still working through all these offenses and recovered property.

We are working to secure a high bond on these guys so they stay in jail while we finish investigations. We are forwarding info to Central and will be contacting their detectives for other possible matching offenses.

These Deployment officers and Detectives have been working since very early this (Wednesday) morning in order to be as thorough as possible.

One thing keeps leading to another.