LACEY, Wash. — Lacey Police used a sly method to track down a man suspecting of stealing equipment from a construction site – and the stolen items.
After a rash of thefts from the site, on Tuesday, members of the Lacey Police Department’s Community Resource Unit (CRU) teamed up with the contractor. They put a GPS tracker on some equipment and then left it in the area where other items had been stolen.
The very next morning the tracker began to move, but police couldn’t find it or the equipment. Officers later reviewed the tracker’s movement and noticed it stopped at a storage facility for a while and then continued to an apartment complex, where it stopped.
Officers searched the area and found it had been thrown into a dumpster.
But they didn’t give up there. When officers revisited the tracker’s course, they noticed a hole cut in a fence surrounding a storage facility that just happened to face the construction site.
Investigators visited the facility, reviewed security footage, and identified a suspect.
Police learned the man was renting two storage units, was wanted by another police agency for theft, and had a warrant from the Department of Corrections.
Unfortunately, since the suspect wasn’t at the storage facility, police asked staff to call them if he came back.
When the call came in, so did the officers, and the suspect was arrested.
His girlfriend, who also rented space at the facility, let police search her unit, saying that her boyfriend stored things in there as well.
Inside, police found thousands of dollars’ worth of stolen equipment.
After getting a warrant for both of their storage units, detectives, patrol officers, CRU members and a crime analyst spent hours combing through the contents.
Police said about $45,000 in stolen property was recovered and will be returned to the construction company.
The suspect was booked into the Thurston County Jail for investigation of burglary, theft, possession of stolen property, malicious mischief, and other existing charges.