The intruder passed by five new Apple laptops in the fifth-floor offices of Tauzin Consultants on New York Avenue. The person ignored the $50 bottle of Basil Hayden bourbon on the managing director’s desk, a gift from a friend.
A similar pattern was repeated in nearly 21 other office break-ins, all linked by D.C. police to a 57-year-old man who authorities said went on a burglary spree starting in January, targeting a dozen office buildings in the District’s downtown. After executing what appeared to be well-planned and meticulous break-ins, primarily in the pre-dawn hours in offices clustered in the Golden Triangle, most of the only items taken were small enough to fit in a hand or concealed in a pocket.
Other than the coins, said Tauzin, the firm’s co-founder and director, “I literally could not find a single thing that was stolen from the office.” He noted that the bourbon and the new computers were in plain sight. “You would have imagined someone doing something with those types of things,” he said. “I guess beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but this is a nice bottle.”
Earlier this month, D.C. police arrested Phillip Andrew Lomax of Northeast Washington after detectives said they traced a stolen Nikon digital camera taken from an eighth-floor suite of an environmental advocacy group to a pawnshop in Maryland.
Lomax has been charged with 22 counts of burglary and is being detained until his next court hearing June 9. Relatives could not be reached, and his attorney, Sara E. Kopecki, declined to comment.
The suspect has numerous prior criminal convictions, including for burglary and attempted burglary. One of those convictions stems from a 2009 break-in at another downtown office building — in the 1700 block of I Street NW — for which he spent three years in prison. “The particulars of this investigation are similar to the circumstances” in the current case, police wrote in an arrest affidavit.
Authorities say that burglars often commit multiple crimes, and one arrest can impact many cases. Overall in the city, burglaries have been declining. The number of burglaries, commercial and residential combined, dropped from 3,182 in 2014 to 2,545 in 2015 and to 2,210 in 2016. This year, police have reported 632 burglaries, compared to 801 at this time last year, a 21 percent drop.
D.C. police Cmdr. Leslie Parsons, who heads the criminal investigation division, said that 22 burglaries is unusually high for one suspect. “I’ve seen high numbers, but this is not really typical,” he said. “Fortunately, we usually can capture suspects before they get up to 22. But this guy was going in after-hours, and it made it difficult. We didn’t have any eyewitnesses to work with.”
Parsons said that given what was taken in this spree, the suspect “was targeting items of value and leaving behind items of lesser value.” So, pocket change over bourbon.
Police said that Lomax got around in a three-year-old white Nissan Altima and carried a black and white backpack. According to police reports, he pried open doors; disabled security cameras; took remote keyless entry devices, known as fobs; broke windowpanes; and taped over locks. Police said the suspect got into a nine-story building on L Street by shoving a rod through a gap in the front doors and using the stick to tap the inside “exit” button, which opened the doors.
In most cases, police reports show that the haul from each office was made up of items of relatively small size, weight and value. Among them: An iPhone from a global food distributor on New York Avenue. Five euros and a $250 gift card from an academic research company on 18th Street. An envelope filled with $300 tucked into a desk drawer in a cubicle at a financial consulting firm on Pennsylvania Avenue. Two digital cameras and a checkbook from an organization that helps people better understand Japan’s relationship with the United States.
And from one desk at an environmental advocacy group on L Street, $10 worth of candy.
Police reports show that the suspect appeared drawn to locked desks and file cabinets.
“Anywhere there was a locked cabinet or a drawer that had the capability of being locked, it was pried open and left open,” Tauzin said. “In one case, he broke the whole front part of a drawer off. It certainly feels like he was thinking there was something valuable in there.”
That could explain the floor safe taken from the eighth-floor office of the National Association of Attorneys General at 20th and M streets in January. A police report says the suspect tried to pry open the safe’s doors with a Phillips screwdriver, but it snapped in half. He then put the safe on a dolly and wheeled it out a loading dock.
The safe was by far the largest item taken during the five-month spree. But a spokeswoman for the attorneys general’ group noted that it contained only petty cash — not much more than was taken from the desks of various offices downtown.
Authorities said the suspect’s undoing came on May 15 with the break-in at the League of Conservation Voters in the 1900 block of L Street NW. A police report says a mailbox key, coins and candy were taken from desks. Also taken was a Nikon D500 digital camera, valued about $500.
Using the camera’s serial number, police scoured records from area pawnshops, who must record sales transactions and give them to authorities. Detectives said in an arrest affidavit that they learned the camera had been sold to a pawnshop in Prince George’s County the same day.
The man who sold it had provided his name, the court document states: Phillip Andrew Lomax, along with his address on C Street in Southeast. Police said his mug shot matched the surveillance videos from the office buildings.
