SAN DIEGO, Calif. (KGTV) - A brazen burglary was caught on surveillance video inside a Poway home early Thursday morning. The same day several neighbors woke up to vandalized vehicles.
“To sit there on my phone and watch some guy just comfortably turn his cellphone light on, look through my kitchen, he dug through every bag,” said Daniel Jestand, as he described watching back surveillance video on his phone of the incident.
The stranger could be seen walking through Jestand’s home on Somerset Road, grabbing belongings, coming back for more, all while Jestand’s family, including three children, slept inside.
“My camera doesn’t go down the hall, and he leaves and goes down the hall for a while, so he had to have went back and peeked in the rooms and saw us sleeping,” said Jestand.
He tells ABC 10News he had no idea that the stranger was in his home overnight. He woke up to open doors but thought a family member may have forgotten to shut them the night before.
On Thursday morning, while at work, Jestand said he got a call from his kids looking for their soccer backpacks.
“I checked my video surveillance to see who might have brought them in throughout the night, and I saw a guy grabbing my kids’ backpacks that I did not recognize and should not be in my house. I immediately left work and came home,” he said.
Once he arrived at his house, he said he saw a San Diego County Sheriff’s deputy speaking with his neighbors.
“So I walked over. I thought maybe they got broken into too, and I see her car, poor girl’s car just vandalized, come to find another one down the street was also vandalized and another one over here,” he said.
Neighbors were busy scrubbing graffiti off of their cars Thursday afternoon.
“I was taking my dog out for a walk this morning, and when I came back from my walk is when I realized my daughter’s car had a big ole ‘made’ on the back of it with orange paint. It was on three sides of the car, the front said ‘your’ the side had a bad word,” said neighbor Karla Hamlin. “I was worried because I thought it was targeted and thought maybe it was a new TikTok craze or something like that.”
Then Hamlin quickly realized other neighbors were dealing with the same thing.
“It’s absolutely concerning,” she said. “We live in Poway; it’s supposed to be a safe neighborhood, and particularly where we live has always been a safe neighborhood. We’re hoping it gets some attention with our law enforcement.”
ABC 10News spotted at least three vandalized cars on Somerset Road and on Scots Way.
“There’s a couple of other neighbors that have gone to work, and we’re hoping their cameras caught something,” said Hamlin.
Residents tell ABC 10News they filed reports with the sheriff’s department but now want everyone in the area to be on high alert in case the person, or people responsible, strike again.
“There’s rarely anything that happens in our neighborhood, so for two different things to occur on the same night, it’s too much of a coincidence,” said Jestand.
Jestand said he handed his surveillance video over to the sheriff’s department. He said at least three of his kids’ bags were stolen with about $1,200 worth of gear in each one.
ABC 10News reached out to the sheriff’s department to see if the separate incidents could be connected but did not immediately hear back
