By John Howell
Thieves struck 20 unlocked vehicles in the Sunrise Hills Subdivision in Batesville early Wednesday morning.

“Lock your car doors!” Batesville Police Department Detective Sergeant Jeremiah Brown said Thursday, a refrain that various BPD officers have repeated during the last several years after vehicle thieves have struck other neighborhoods

The first vehicle burglary report came in about 6 a.m. but had been foreshadowed by a 4:30 a.m. call from a neighborhood resident who was returning home on Trianon after having taken her husband to work. She told police that as she drove on Trianon, she saw someone holding a flashlight run across the street in front of her.

The person went to a “gray-colored vehicle,” Brown continued. “That vehicle fell in behind hers and followed her to her home and then drove by slowly.”

Two officers responded to the woman’s call and took her statement, Brown said.
The vehicle burglars had apparently done their work between 3 and 4 a.m. Wednesday, the detective sergeant said, and struck vehicles parked in driveways at homes on Pine Lane Drive and Vick, Trianon and Dettor streets.

“Every one of them was unlocked,” Brown said. “I had people tell me, ‘I lock my car every night.’
“I asked them if the window was broken. They said, ‘No. I must have forgot to lock it last night.”
Brown said that where two vehicles were parked side by side in a driveway and one was locked and the other unlocked, the thieves left the locked vehicle alone.

Taken were purses, wallets and the loose change people often leave visible in consoles. Three purses and most of their contents were recovered between houses or in the street. The thieves had apparently rifled quickly through the contents, “…got what they wanted and went to the next car,” Brown said.

The detective said that he believes that the vehicle burglaries included “at least a handful of individuals to hit that many cars in that big an area.”

Anyone with information about the Wednesday morning vehicle burglaries is urged to contact Det. Sgt. Jeremiah Brown at 662-563-4591.