Tonia Obregon left her house Monday morning to take her 19-year-old son for emergency oral surgery.
Tonia Obregon left her house Monday morning to take her 19-year-old son for emergency oral surgery.
When she returned home, she found the door open and the bedrooms ransacked by burglars, who took jewelry and another son’s collection of signed baseballs.
“It was horrible,” Obregon said Thursday. “It looked like a hurricane hit it. Every drawer was dumped out.”
Monday’s burglary wasn’t the first at her house, which is below the Kealakekua McDonald’s. Two weeks earlier, someone broke into her husband’s vehicle, taking everything in sight, and removing stereo equipment. After that theft, Obregon started locking her home more regularly, something she and other Kealakekua residents didn’t formerly make a habit of, she said.
Her husband, just days before that theft, had removed a spare key, hidden on his vehicle, after a friend reported having his truck stolen, Obregon said. The burglars who broke into her house this week took that spare key, which led to another tense few minutes on Tuesday.
“Then we had a truck pull in front of our house at 2:30 a.m. Tuesday night,” she said, adding she wondered if it was the same thieves, back to take her husband’s vehicle. If it was, they decided not to.
Obregon had a little good luck, though. The thief or thieves sold some of the jewelry, items belonging to her 15-year-old daughter, to a roadside gold buyer, who then took the items to a thrift store. A relative working in the thrift store recognized the teenager’s bracelet. Those items are in police custody now, Obregon said.
The man did not have any information on the people from whom he purchased the items, she added.
She also put out word, via Facebook and old-fashioned word-of-mouth, that she was looking for the signed baseballs, which her father gave to her son. One, with Barry Bonds’ signature, “magically” returned to her, she said. She would love to see the others, with signatures from Joe DiMaggio, Willie Mays, Hank Aaron, Sandy Koufax and Duke Snider, also returned.
Obregon’s family isn’t alone in being victimized by burglars. Kona Capt. Chad Basque, who is in charge of the Area II Criminal Investigations Division, confirmed what South Kona residents told West Hawaii Today on Thursday — burglaries and car thefts are on the rise.
“We have identified persons of interests, and three arrests have been made,” Basque said.
The department is working on filing charges against those three people, he added.
He did not have the exact number of burglary and car theft reports available Thursday. The Area II Patrol supervisor, Capt. Richard Sherlock, was out of the office and unavailable for comment.
Basque said “legitimate” business owners are legally required to provide information about people from whom they’ve purchased items to police.
People may also be charged with receiving and possessing stolen items, Basque said, although he added the people “have got to have known” the items were stolen.
He referred questions about a lack of police-community interaction about the rash of burglaries to the Patrol section.
Longtime Neighborhood Watch coordinator Miles Mulcahy said he had fielded a number of emails and comments from South Kona residents concerned about the recent uptick in crimes.
“For the past 10 years, we’ve had a really good rapport with police,” Mulcahy said. “I have not heard anything from the police on these burglaries.”
He passed along several anonymous comments he’d received, including complaints of police not being helpful, and residents who tracked down and retrieved their own stolen vehicles.