Overnight south Austin 'smash and grab' crime spree
An overnight "smash and grab" crime spree in south Austin ended after a high speed chase near UT. Police say two burglars hit eight cell phone stores. And, one of the suspects is still on the run.
Sweeping up piles of broken glass is not how the owners of this cricket cell phone store intended to spend their Friday. The front windows were hit by several shots from a pellet gun.
"It looks like 20 to 25 shots there,” said Sadiq Rahman while pointing to the front of his store.
Rahman's Cricket phone store, near I-35 and Slaughter Lane is one of eight stores targeted by two smash and grab burglars .
"It’s really upsetting, because Austin is not known for all of these things,” said Rahman.
Alarms started going off across south Austin shortly after midnight. The patrol officers who responded to the different locations looked at surveillance video and sent out a description of the suspects they were spotted in a stolen truck on Stassney Lane.
" And the guys on patrol did a great job on this, it’s hard but they communicated, they have different radio channels dealing with different crime scenes and they were able to piece everything together, and get information out and get one suspect brought in pretty quickly,” APD Sgt Jerry Sullivan.
The 15 year old suspect who is in custody was caught in UT’s west campus near the intersection of 21st & Guadalupe after a high speed chase. The other suspect jumped out of the truck when the chase started and got away.
Investigators did recover a pellet gun they believed was used during the Friday morning smash and grabs as well as cash and a large number of cellphones.
"In this situation we are probably going to be able to clear up multiple burglaries from these suspects,” said Sgt Sullivan.
FOX 7 has learned there have been similar smash and grab robberies in Austin dating back to last fall. Investigators say they are also going to see if there is a link to cases that happened in Houston last week.