Snow Tracks Lead Sapulpa Police To Stolen Property

If you think there's nothing good whatsoever about the snow, consider this, it seems like at least once every winter, police catch a suspect because of footprints in snow. <br/><br/>News on 6 reporter

Tuesday, December 5th 2006, 10:17 am

By: News On 6

If you think there's nothing good whatsoever about the snow, consider this, it seems like at least once every winter, police catch a suspect because of footprints in snow.

News on 6 reporter Steve Berg says it happened last Friday in Sapulpa where they think they've solved not just one, but half-a-dozen burglaries.

Sapulpa Police Lt. Mike Haefner says they called to Jefferson Elementary School by the school janitor.

This was on Friday morning after last week's snowstorm. "Of course the snow and ice are fairly fresh. And as they look outside, they notice at least a couple of sets of tracks that lead off into the neighborhood to the north and west."

In the best Sherlock Holmes tradition, the officer followed the footprints to a house not far away, where they found some juveniles and enough electronics, tools, and other merchandise to make Santa's elves jealous. They think the group of teens are responsible for burglaries at some homes and another school, with the most expensive loot being some flat-screen computer monitors. "How they knew, unless one of these blinds were up or something, how they knew that would be the actual computer room, I don't know. But that's actually their computer center."

But Sapulpa Police say they didn't think about their footprints. "Sometimes it's good for us that the criminals don't think of everything. It's the little mistakes that usually come back and haunt them."

Lt. Haefner says the officer on this case has some experience with tracking. "He's off hunting today. In fact our shift was a little short-handed today and I gave him a call last night and wanted to know if he wanted to come to work today. And he said, 'no I'm going to try and get a deer this morning.' For some reason the bad guys seem to think we don't like to get out in the cold, which isn't the truth."