An Aurora couple has been left shaken after confronting a group that was “car hopping” in the parking lot of their apartment building.
Brittney Megann said she and her husband were returning home after going out for dinner March 12 at about 9:25 p.m. when they noticed someone wearing a mask dart behind their building’s garbage cans.
Megann’s husband, Jake Baziotopoulos, confronted the person who claimed they were “just hanging out.” But when Megann asked her building manager for video camera footage, the footage showed several other masked individuals, all dressed in black, moving down the road. Megann said they appeared to “systematically check every vehicle’s door handles,” even entering some of the unlocked cars.
“This is Aurora, this is a small town,” she said. “This is somewhere that I've always felt is a safe place to be. Over the past year or so, I want to say even since COVID, things have gotten worse, for sure.”
Police spokesperson Const. James Dickson said the incident was filed as a suspicious persons report, which can help try and “identify circumstances where we may have multiple individually reported cases that are part of a larger one, particularly for something like car hopping where we know that it's very rare for suspects only to target a single building or a single address.”
“These kinds of incidents are often referred to as “car hopping” and it does unfortunately occur year-round across the region,” added Dickson. “Thieves, generally in groups, will walk up and down residential streets trying handles of vehicles attempting to gain access to unlocked cars.
“Often times these events are not reported and sometimes the thefts are not noticed until days after,” he added. “It’s possible for the suspects to attempt to access hundreds of cars in an evening. We always encourage the public to report any suspicious activity they observe in order for these events to be properly investigated.”
The day after the incident, another building resident, Jithin Jerard, found multiple pairs of Ray-Ban sunglasses had been stolen from his car, worth hundreds of dollars each. Dickson confirmed the incident had been assigned to an investigator.
“We do again very much want to make sure that if anybody, even if they haven't had anything damaged, even if they haven't had anything stolen, to please make sure that they're reporting these incidents, because very often this is just one small element of a larger pattern,” said Dickson.
“The only way we're able to identify these patterns is if we're aware of the information that's being provided to us,” he added. “We very much rely on the community support, as well as the help from anyone in the area, to be able to have all the information to see the totality of what's actually happening in our neighbourhoods.”
Police recently released a list of six steps residents and businesses can take to help guard against break-ins, which included putting indoor and outdoor lights on timers, cutting back trees and shrubs that block the view of entrances and storing valuables somewhere unexpected.
This came after YRP’s hold-up unit released images of a suspect in the daytime home invasion in Aurora on March 6.
