Car-hopping thievery strikes east side Batavia

You may want to add two tasks to your before-bed routine: Check to make sure the car doors are locked and the garage door is closed.

Some Batavia residents learned the hard way Sunday morning that leaving either unlocked provides the easiest pickings, at the lowest risk, for criminals.

Five vehicles in the 500 block of East Wilson Street and the 0-99 block of South College Street were burglarized. The earliest report was made to Batavia police at 6:18 a.m.

The thieves took a Pioneer CD player faceplate, a Cobra radar detector, an iPod, two packs of cigarettes, cash and a $5 casino chip out of three of the vehicles, as well as a red cooler of beer that was stored on a front porch. The owners of two of the vehicles also reported they had been burglarized the night before; one had an iPod stolen out of a vehicle, and the other had beer and liquor stolen out of an open garage.

Batavia Detective Gary LaBarbera said the police don’t have a suspect or suspects identified.

“Typically it is a team of kids,” known as car-hoppers, he said. Car-hoppers go through neighborhoods late at night, quickly checking vehicles for unlocked doors. They grab what’s lying around in cars — the GPS devices, cellphone chargers, and iPods that people use daily in the vehicles, LaBarbera said.

He figures the thieves are calculating risk vs. reward; they decide not to smash windows so as not to call attention to themselves.

Last year, Batavia had two incidents of car-hopping by a four-person team. One, a 17-year-old boy from Batavia, pleaded guilty to burglary, and he also pleaded guilty to burglary of vehicles in Geneva.