Nearly witnessed breaking and entering in the Pearl.

How strange that on the heels of cleaning up old witness subpoena papers (and writing about it) last week from an incident occurring last year, early this morning -- just before 1:00 am -- I essentially came across a breaking and entering scene downstairs in my building.

I was walking the dog back from a short walk when I thought I saw some odd behavior a block away near my building.  Three people all wearing dark clothes and appearing to carry bags of different sizes, looked like they were jostling around near my building before walking away from my direction.

Sure enough, when I got up to my building, I could plainly see the shattered glass door and a glass mannequin head on the sidewalk.  I was sure that this trio was responsible, and started following them as I called the police.  Not wanting to be a vigilante, I stayed a full block behind them while talking directions and descriptions of the suspects with the 911 operator.  (Of course it's hard to describe what people look like from a block away at night with these lousy HPS lights.  As soon as the City of Portland switches to 4500K LED lights, I won't have to struggle with seeing what's going on a block away at night.)

Oh yeah, these were definitely suspicious people.  They had split up to opposite sides of the street and one had taken an extended look at some parked cars on NW 10th.  They weren't meandering and looking around for nothing.  By the time the police showed up, they cornered two of the people but the third person had split off and it was too late (not enough officers on scene).

Long story short, from what I could gather, these were definitely the people who broke into the business as one offered a lame excuse to the officers -- that they did not see the glass which they walked right through on the sidewalk, but somehow managed to leave an object behind -- and in fact there was evidence left behind.

Now, unfortunately I did not hear or see the break in, but because I was close enough to being there at the right time, and was tracking the trio as they walked away, one of the suspects was arrested on an outstanding warrant.  This fella happened to be carrying a large backpack, and refused to give consent to search his bag.  I'm sure that they're going to find the stolen headphones, once they do get a warrant to open it up, but the issue of probable cause stopped them from holding on to the second suspect, though they did gather that person's information.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: Step up silent patrols between 12:30 and 3:30 am and almost all of the property crimes will have been prevented.  This marks THREE TIMES in the last three years that I've come upon a crime while walking the dog or riding my bike, and they've all been within these hours.