By Joe Johnson
Three arrests were made this week for a string of vehicle break ins and a fourth arrest is pending.
The crew of alleged thieves targeted a total of 10 vehicles, according to Nathaniel Franco, a property crimes detective with the Athens-Clarke County Police Department.
Four of the incidents occurred Aug. 4 on Ruth Street, Peabody Street, and at the Gamme Phi Beta sorority house on South Milledge Avenue, the detective said, and six more happened on Aug. 14 at the Woodlands of Athens apartments on Barnett Shoals Road.
Items that were reported as stolen from the vehicles included two guns, cash, tools, wallets, and a laptop computer.
“They stole all kinds of property,” Franco said.
Three suspects who were arrested were identified after an accomplice sold stolen tools to a pawn shop and a GPS tracker in one of them “pinged” near the Rolling Ridge apartment where the woman who sold the stolen tools lived, he said. A search of the apartment turned up a gun which, at the time, was not known to be stolen.
Brianna Paige CollinsThree arrests were made this week for a string of vehicle break ins and a fourth arrest is pending.
The group targeted a total of 10 vehicles, according to Nathaniel Franco, a property crimes detective with the Athens-Clarke County Police Department.
Four of the incidents occurred Aug. 4 on Ruth Street, Peabody Street, and at the Gamme Phi Beta sorority house on South Milledge Avenue, the detective said, and six more happened on Aug. 14 at the Woodlands of Athens apartments on Barnett Shoals Road.
Items that were reported as stolen from the vehicles included two guns, cash, tools, wallets, and a laptop computer.
“They stole all kinds of property,” Franco said.
Three suspects who were arrested were identified after an accomplice sold stolen tools to a pawn shop and a GPS tracker in one of them “pinged” near the Rolling Ridge apartment where the woman who sold the stolen tools lived, he said. A search of the apartment turned up a gun which was not yet known to be stolen.
Brianna Paige Collins, 25, was arrested for theft by deception and theft by receiving stolen property, and her boyfriend, 20-year-old Anthony Michael Davis, was arrested on 10 counts of entering an automobile with the intent to commit a felony.
After a victim at Woodlands of Athens had tracked his stolen wallet, which had a Tile GPS tracker in it, to Rolling Ridge, Franco said, and officers who went to Rolling Ridge to investigate saw Davis grab a bag from the woods and run into his apartment.
“I obtained a search warrant for this apartment and recovered a gun that had been stolen overnight from The Woodlands, as well as the driver's license and stolen financial transaction cards from another victim at The Woodlands;” the detective said. “After that, I was able to review video footage at this complex showing three males leaving together before these entering autos and returning after they had been completed. The video footage even showed them unloading the stolen merchandise from their vehicles after they returned from these thefts.”
The video provided further evidence against Davis and led to the identification of 20-year-old Elijah Lewis as a suspect who was subsequetly arrested and charged for 10 vehicle break-ins. The video aklso helped to identify a fourth suspect, for whom warrants were obtained but had not been arrested as of Friday.
The detective said that the four suspects were well acquainted with each other, which apparently made them comfortable committing crimes as a group.
“Davis and Collins live in the same apartment. They are dating. Lewis lives across the hall from them. The other guy lives a few buildings down. During one set of thefts, they drove a vehicle registered to Lewis's girlfriend, which tied him to the group” Franco said.
As of Friday, Collins and Lewis had bonded out of jail and Davis remained in custody in lieu of bonds totaling $5,000.
That elephant is in the room again.
Let's play a little game. Using the most recent census, and presuming that all races have the same proclivity for theft, one could wager that there was a 65.4% chance these thieves were white. Or, you could wager that their was a 27.5% chance that the perps would be black. That's how our population breaks down currently. And reading the headline we had no idea the race of the thieves but there was (based solely on race) a more than 2x chance the bad guys were white. Anybody think for even a second they were white?
She kinda looks like the Piggly Wiggly meat thief from several years ago.
If elected, maybe Stacy Abrams will have free insulin for the peoples.