'We’re afraid to leave the house now:' Help ID burglars who hit home while family's daughter was inside
WANTED IN KING COUNTY - King County Sheriff’s detectives are hoping you can help catch a couple wanted for an occupied home burglary on May 6th in an unincorporated area of King County near Woodinville.
The two suspects thought they were pretty clever. A first glance at the home surveillance video above and you might think the woman knocking on the victim’s front door is frantically looking for a lost dog. She had a plastic folder with photos of a pet, but there's no lost dog. It's a ruse. She ran back and got in the passenger seat of a stolen silver Kia. Then, the video shows the driver get out to go scope out the home. He returned a short time later and eventually they drove away. But, little did they know when they returned to burglarize the home that there was teenage girl inside.
Malcom Nesbitt was at work when he got a panicked call from his daughter after a burglar smashed out the glass to their kitchen door. "My daughter is sitting in this area doing homework,
at this point, the person’s in the house with my daughter on the other side of this door," said Nesbitt.
She'd called him earlier when she heard the woman knocking on the door for two minutes, but when he looked at the security video on his phone, the woman was gone. "But then, half an hour later, they came back. And, that's when my daughter hears a big crash and she calls me again at work saying, ‘I think it's from inside the house?’ And, then she heard some more noises and I’m like, ‘Where are ya?’ ‘I'm in the TV room,’ she said. I’m like, ‘Go out. Leave the house’ and she ran out the door and literally ran barefoot across our backyard to a neighbor's house," said Nesbitt.
He raced home as he called 911. His daughter was safe, but when he got there, he found his bedroom ransacked. "They took the pillowcases off the bed and they took all the jewelry off my wife's jewelry stand and all the doors are open and lots of stuff had been taken."
His surveillance camera showed the suspect leaving through the front door and there's the silver Kia waiting. "You'll notice that the license plates that were present when they first came up have now since been removed and they're trying to disguise the Kia, we believe, to look like it was recently purchased and they leave with a little bit of haste out of the driveway," said King County Sheriff’s Office Sgt. Tim Meyer.
Detectives say the Kia was rented from Sea-Tac airport last February by someone using a fake ID. Detectives want to find that stolen car and need your help to identify the two suspects. "We know people are going to see them, they're going to recognize them, they're going to have friends that are driving this silver Kia sedan that no one knows where it came from. Turn them in do the right thing," said Sgt. Meyer.
Both suspects are white, in their 20s or 30s.
The woman is showing some bleach blonde hair, but of course, that could be a wig with the lengths these two went through to try to see if the house was empty.
She ran back to the car with a pretty unique waddle.
Detectives caution your home could be next. "These are very, very serious crimes. This isn't just a property crime. This is an occupied burglary, some of the most personal crimes we can have against ourselves and our family," said Sgt. Meyer.
Nobody knows that better than the Nesbitt family, after their daughter had to flee her home in terror. "We’re afraid to leave the house now. You don't want to leave the house unattended now, so we're just not doing very much right now until we get our door sorted and figure some things out," said Nesbitt.
If you can identify either suspect or tell deputies where to find that silver Kia, Crime Stoppers of Puget Sound will pay you a cash reward of up to $1,000. It is anonymous, so text the information through the P3 Tips app on your cell phone, or call 1-800-222-TIPS(8477).