HOMESTEAD, FLA. (WSVN) – A crafty crook caused plenty of trouble — and damage — at a storage facility in Homestead, and the bumbling break-in that led to his arrest was caught on video.
It was a woeful Thursday morning for the suspected storage unit burglar, whose slipshod attempts to make off with tens of thousands of dollars in valuables from the SmartStop Self Storage at 1235 NE 12th Ave. were documented on cellphone video.
Witnesses were heard commenting on the failed Fourth of July heist on the video that made its way to social media hours later.
“There he is. Bro! Only in Dade!” said a witness in the video.
“Oh, my God. He’s inside the unit now,” said a witness as police sirens could be heard in the background.
Homestead Police officers soon took center stage as they took down 34-year-old Tyvarius Tygwyan Straoudmattison and led him away in handcuffs.
A victim who asked not to be identified or show his face on camera said the crook cleaned out his unit.
“I noticed that almost $25,000 of my items was gone,” he said. “It was all my items taken out.”
The victim said Straoudmattison had been hitting this business for at least the last couple of days.
Fed up, the victim said, he reported the crime, then decided to stake out SmartStop overnight.
Sure enough, he and other others spotted Straoudmattison — again — called police and began recording the burglar.
They quickly realized he wasn’t very good at breaking and entering.
“They noticed that the individual was actually jumping from unit to unit,” said the victim. “The technique that he used, it was actually through the ceiling.”
“Oh, [expletive]! He’s gonna fall!” said a witness in the cellphone video.
“Good. Let him,” said another witness.
And he did. One could say he was failing upward.
“He’s gonna [expletive] fall! Oh, oh my God!” said a witness as the crook took a nasty tumble from the ceiling.
Moments later, he fell into the hands of arresting officers.
The victim said more than 30 police officers responded to the storage facility, including members of the SWAT team.
Straoudmattison faces several charges, which include burglary to an unoccupied structure, grand theft, and resisting an officer without violence.
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