New Haven Independent

Police on Monday announced the arrest of a a 30-year-old man and a 22-year-old woman who they said are connected to at least two burglaries in New Haven and several more in Woodbridge and Hamden. The couple was arrested in East Haven on Dec 18.

Due in part to some civilian detective work by the Cohen family (daughter Danielle Cohen is pictured in the doorway of the family’s home), the man and woman have been linked to several recent robberies, police said.

When the Cohens discovered their house had been burglarized on Dec. 16, they took extra investigative measures of their own that helped police track down and identify the alleged burglars.

The Cohens live on Colony Road in the Beaver Hills neighborhood. Theirs is one of two homes that were burglarized during the early morning hours of Dec. 16. Another house on the street reported an attempted burglary that night. The burglar also allegedly stole the Cohens’ car.

Interviews Monday with Danielle Cohen and Sgt. Herb Sharp, head of the police department’s burglary unit, revealed how police caught up to the alleged burglars.

Danielle, who’s living back at home with her mom Cathy and dad Joel after graduating from New York’s The New School, remembers the night of the burglary. She was sleeping on the third floor of the house with the family dog, a boxer. Both of them were woken up by a bang. “Me and Buster looked at each other,” Danielle recalled. She and her dog were alarmed, but she figured her parents — on the second floor — would take care of whatever it was. She and Buster went back to sleep.

When she got up on the morning of Dec. 16, she went downstairs to find her parents “freaking out” and pieces of the back door on the floor. The house had been burglarized.

The family’s Nintendo Wii was missing along with its copy of Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess. Also missing was some jewelry that had belonged to Danielle’s maternal grandmother. The thief had grabbed the family car keys and taken off in the Cohens’ Honda hybrid, the one with the plastic flower attached to the antenna.

Danielle’s mom Cathy noticed her purse was in a different place from where she’d left it. Looking through it, Cathy realized that although her wallet was still there, one credit card was missing. She called the credit card company, reported the card missing, and asked to be notified if anyone tried to use it.

Not long after that, the alleged burglar stopped to fill up on gas. The credit card company called Cathy. She contacted the police, who grabbed a video still from the gas station’s surveillance cameras that showed the face of the man who was driving her car.

“We couldn’t link him to the burglary,” said Sgt. Sharp. “But we definitely had him on a stolen vehicle.”

Then Cathy started calling around to all the pawn shops in town, describing her missing jewelry, including a valuable watch.

“My mom was doing her own detective work,” Danielle said.

At one pawn shop, Cathy got a match. She met the police at the store and ID’d the watch. The police looked at the shop’s recent transaction sheets and pulled up the name of the man who’d pawned it.

Now the police had a name, Sharp said. And they had the photo from the gas station. They ran the name through police records and found that the man had an arrest record — and a picture on file. “The picture matched the gas station photo,” Sharp said. That’s when police connected the alleged car thief with the burglary.

All that remained was to find the guy. The New Haven police put out the word that they were looking for a stolen car and a possible burglar.

On Dec. 18, an off-duty East Haven detective saw the stolen Honda turn into the parking lot of a Quality Inn Motel in East Haven. He called in East Haven police, who made an arrest in the motel lobby. They took in a 22-year-old woman and a 30-year-old man. The couple’s listed address was on Sylvan Avenue in New Haven.

New Haven Det. Christopher Perrone and Officer Ronald Perry went to the East Haven police department to interview the couple. The man wouldn’t talk. The woman did. “She put him and her inside of homes in Hamden, Woodbridge, and New Haven,” Sharp said.

Police found a garbage bag in the Cohens’ car, half-filled with jewelry and credit cards, Sharp said. Woodbridge, Hamden, and New Haven police are now going through the bag of stolen jewelry and linking it to recent burglaries, he said. Arrest warrants for multiple break-ins are expected.

Sharp said the arrested couple are drug addicts, “breaking into homes for the next fix.” There was a “suicide pact between the two,” he reported.

The Cohens played a “very, very important role” in solving the case, Sharp said. His unit gets a lot of burglary reports. Officers make long lists of stolen property — with descriptions and serial numbers — and then circulate those lists to local pawn shops. “That can take days and days,” he said. By calling all the shops herself, Cathy short-circuited the system.

Sharp said that Patrol Officer Edward Marrone also played a key role in the investigation.

Danielle said this month’s burglary is not the first her family has experienced in 28 years on Colony Road. The family is now taking extra precautions — like making sure Buster is downstairs at night to act as a burglar deterrent, not sleeping on the third floor with Danielle.