Two young men carried out two home invasions in New Haven this month — and the cops now have them in custody, according to police spokesman Officer David Hartman.
Hartman announced the arrests Tuesday.
He said police separately picked up the two men, who are 19 and 21 years old.
He said the two men, one carrying a handgun, broke into a first-floor apartment on Huntington Street at Prospect a 4 p.m. on May 6, and confronted the two women inside (aged 58 and 71). They tied up the older woman. Then they made off with a white 2003 Pontiac Aztek belonging to one of the women. The women were not injured.
Hartman said the same guys hit a home on one-block Osbourne Street (in the Wooster Square neighborhood) a week later, on May 14 at 3:17 p.m. Armed and masked, they broke into the house, tied up the 38-year-old man and 32-year-old woman inside, then made off with “valuables” and the victims’ 2004 Dodge Intrepid, police said.
The first break in the case came later in the week when investigators came across surveillance video footage from a spot on Henry Street. The video showed someone parking the stolen car and getting out of it. The detectives on the case — Jessica Stone, Manuella Vensel and John
Pleckaitis — now had a suspect’s image to work with. They soon found out his name, too.
The next break came last week when Hamden police caught a man driving a stolen car. He looked like the suspect in the video. He had the same name. Based on their other investigation into the incident, the police charged the man as one of the attackers in the two home invasions.
The detectives subsequently came up with the identity of the alleged accomplice. Officer David Acosta and other members of the U.S. Marshals Task Force arrested the man, who was also wanted for escaping a halfway house, at his home on Highland Street early Tuesday. He’s being held on $1 million bond. The other alleged attacker is being held on $650,000 bond.
In other crime news, police arrested a 35-year-old man last Friday afternoon after he allegedly flew into a rage at a female acquaintance, threw bottles at her, tried to light the apartment on fire using rubbing alcohol (didn’t work), then pinned her to her couch in a Farren Avenue apartment. She broke free, tried to call 911; the man “grabbed the phone and destroyed it,” Officer Hartman reported. The woman then escaped to the apartment of a neighbor, who called the cops. The attacker “fled on a bicycle”; “minutes later,” top East Shore cop Sgt. Vincent Anastasio spotted him on Laura Street and arrested him on criminal-mischief, interfering, and attempted-arson charges.
wow
Great detective and policing work!