Car-swipers continued on a Honda-grabbing spree for a second week, as police grabbed one suspect — a potentially important suspect.
Fourteen out of 21 car thefts in town between Sunday March 10 and Saturday March 16 involved Hondas, police said.
That followed a week in which all 10 car thefts and an 11th attempted theft involved Hondas.
The stolen cars tend to be Hondas from the 1990s and early 2000s, before the company fixed an ignition design that made it easy for thieves to start them up with simple flat pieces of metal.
Paul Bass Photo
The police have been working on a strategy to track down the Honda thieves. In the meantime, they got a break this past Thursday, thanks to the work of Hill Officer Salvador Rodriguez (pictured in file photo).
A Honda had been reported stolen on Harrington Avenue in the Annex neighborhood.
Then someone reported a car blocking a driveway across town in the Hill neighborhood. That someone called in the license plate number. Cops ran the plate. It belonged to the Honda stolen in the Annex.
Officer Rodriguez went to the driveway to check out the report. The Honda was gone.
He cruised the neighborhood looking for it. He found the car nearby on Ward Street. An 18-year-old man was inside the car; police arrested him for allegedly stealing it, according to Rodriguez’s boss, Lt. Joe Witkowski.
The arestee lives on Asylum Street. A bunch of the recently stolen Hondas have ended up abandoned on or near Asylum Street. The police don’t know yet if that means this man was responsible for at least some of those thefts; they think he may have been. Next week’s numbers should offer a clue.