A University of Georgia research scientist and his wife Wednesday night returned to their home on Falling Shoals Drive to find someone used a brick to smash out the glass of a back door.
Four days earlier, a couple arrived home on St. Ives Lane and were also greeted by a smashed back door and a house that had been ransacked.
It wasn’t just the way that the two homes had been entered and pillaged were similar. The scientist and his wife, who also is a UGA employee, are Asian. So are the burglary victims on Falling Shoals Drive. The man is said by police to be a manager of an eastside Chinese restaurant.
Authorities believe the same group of criminals who this year targeted nearly a dozen homes of Asian victims in areas south of Atlanta are now operating in Athens-Clarke County.
The thieves have struck at least 10 times in Peachtree City alone since the beginning of the year, according to Peachtree City police Lt. Matt Meyers, commander of his department’s Criminal Investigations Division who said he has shared information with burglary investigators in Athens.
A local connection to what was happening in the Fayette County community was made in July, when Peachtree City arrested three suspects, one of whom had a cellphone containing information for an address on Mountain Laurel Run in Athens. Myers contacted a resident there — an Asian woman — and told her about the burglaries his department was investigating and advised her to file a report with police in Athens.
Myers told the woman about how Asians in the Peachtree City area were experiencing daytime burglaries of their homes, in which the suspects used ruses when checking to see if homes were occupied or not.
Her conversation with the police lieutenant made the woman re-think an incident that occurred four days earlier, when a stranger showed up at her front door, purporting to be there in connection with a vehicle that was involved in an accident. The woman reported the suspicious encounter to police in Athens after hanging up with Myers.
Athens-Clarke County police did not respond to several requests for comment about the burglars who were targeting Asian victims, so it is not known how many possibly related break-is were being investigated here.
It is known through publicly-released police incident reports that there have been at least two — the Sept. 3 break-in on St. Ives Lane and the burglary four days later, on Sept. 7 on Falling Shoals Drive.
The pair of burglaries netted thieves more than $18,000 in cash and jewelry.
According to Myers, two of the three suspects who were arrested in Peachtree City two months ago were at large at the time of the Athens burglaries, after having been granted bail and bonding out of jail.
Myers said investigators believed the burglars belonged to the same criminal enterprise. He said investigators had a good idea why this group was specifically targeting Asians, but he declined to say what that was.
In other communities where Asians were victimized by rashes of burglaries, it was said that burglars selected homes in which they thought there was a good likelihood that cash and high-end jewelry would be found.
Tim Law, a native of Hong Kong who is a community advocate in Brooklyn, N.Y. was reported as saying cultural preferences may place some Asians at risk for burglary.
“The Asian population puts a lot of cash and jewelry in their homes. They want to see the money every day. It gives them comfort,” Law told the Bensonhurst Bean, an online news source. “It relates back to their culture. They don’t trust the banking system.”
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