Grate Solution Pitched For Burglary Wave

Amid a spike of overnight burglaries, top west side cop Elliot Rosa is trying to convince wary business owners like Reinaldo Capetillo to install roll-up metal grates — and he’s touting a friendlier new model.

Beaver Hills, Dwight, Kensington and Westville have seen 15 commercial burglaries in the last two weeks. Nine of those have been in Westville. The vast majority happened between 2 a.m. and 5 a.m.

Because the burglaries happen so quickly, police officers do not arrive at the scene until after the items have been stolen and the burglar is gone. Cameras do not necessarily catch the face of the person responsible either, since Covid-19 has made face coverings commonplace.

“I would love to have a cop on every corner, but that’s not cost effective,” said Rosa, district manager for West Hills/Westville/West Rock/Amity/Beverly Hills. ​“The best way to fight these is hardening the target.”

Rosa, a veteran, has borrowed the term from the military. The idea is to prevent burglaries by making it harder to smash windows, the main way the burglaries have been taking place.

Some store owners have balked at the idea of grates over windows, worrying that affluent customers will start thinking Westville is an unsafe area.

Rosa said he hopes that mesh grills will solve this concern. They come in a variety of sizes and patterns and can look almost artistic, he said. He has not picked out a favorite brand; he started researching options and found a few different websites just focused on Connecticut roll-up grates.

Two Break-ins In One Month

The owner of the Mobil Mart at 1474 Whalley Ave. is seriously considering Rosa’s solution. The gas station has been the target of burglaries so many times that the owner has boarded up every window in the convenience store for the time being.

Two of the break-ins happened in the last month. That has made cashier Mohamed Ali nervous about coming to work. He parks in front of the shop and walks in carefully, wondering if he will find glass on the floor again.

Ali has the full footage of one of the break-ins on his phone, compiled from the security cameras around the shop. The video, attached above, shows how quickly the break-ins take place. The burglar was get in and out of the locked store in under two minutes.

First he tried throwing a rock at one of the front windows. It didn’t break, so he tried a side window. He was able to slide in through that hole, grab cash and stuff packets of cigarettes into a box before crawling back out with his loot.

The break-in didn’t trigger any of the store’s sensors, since the burglar didn’t open any doors or windows. Ali was surprised to find the mess of cigarettes and glass the next morning. It takes him time to clean it all up before he can open up shop for the day.

Rosa informed Ali that the New Haven Police Department was able to find this particular burglar and is formalizing his arrest. The man admitted to five of the recent burglaries.

Rosa showed the mesh grates to Ali and asked him if he would talk to his boss about it. Ali said the grates were exactly what they were thinking about installing.

“People Will Think We’re Not Safe”

Amity Brick Oven Pizza owner Sam Hammoda was less persuaded by Rosa’s pitch. His shop has never been burgled. At this point, he said, he definitely does not want grates installed.

“It will make it so ugly. We’re not in New York,” Hammoda said. ​“People will think we’re not safe.”

It could even encourage crime and make it easier to see which windows to target, he worried.

The pizza shop isn’t a logical target anyway. Almost 95 percent of his customers pay by card, so he has little cash to steal, he argued.

Next door, Andes International Gourmet Deli owners Wilson Ramones and Monica Chacha had split opinions on the grates.

Chacha had seen similar grates in Ecuador, the country she emigrated from. The grates would be a nice extra protection at night, as long as the owner of the shopping plaza pays instead of individual shop keepers.

Ramones, on the other hand, said that the grates should stay in Ecuador. He sees grates as a signal of unsafe places one should not visit.

“It’s America. It’s the best country in the world. There should be 24-hour security and new technology,” Ramones said. ​“There should be more police security. A lot of young people need jobs. They could go for police jobs.”

The New Haven Police Department shrank last year when Mayor Justin Elicker and the Board of Alders weighed what to slash in an already tight budget.

Ramones already has a different kind of ​“hardening the target” set-up in the shop. When someone recently tried to steal cash from the store, alarms went off and scared the individual away.

Stolen Puppies

Each shop is only as fortified as its neighbors, in Rosa’s view.

Safari Stan’s Pet Center has sheets of plastic molded into its windows. The windows are virtually unbreakable.

The shop next door to Safari Stan’s was not so impenetrable. Some skilled burglar broke into that shop and used power tools to cut a hole in the wall between the stores. Safari Stan’s employees returned the next morning to find puppies gone and a hole in the back of the store.

“We never even fathomed someone could get through the wall,” said center minority owner Reinaldo Capetillo.

The burglary left heartbreak in its wake. Capetillo had bonded with the puppies, as the employees always do. There was a picky eater among the stolen puppies, who needed love and attention before turning to food. There was a spunky English bulldog and an energetic cocker spaniel whose brother was left behind, and later adopted.

Two of the puppies were finishing up treatment plans prescribed by a vet. Capetillo choked up worrying that the stolen dogs were not in good care.

“They were still being treated. I know not everyone knows how to take care of dogs. It took us time to learn too. I like to think positive that they found good homes,” Capetillo said.