FOCUS: CRIME
Victims lose in game of cops and robbers
Some burglary victims say police don’t care about investigations
Buffalo police solve one in 10 burglaries, a record not much worse than those of most big cities. But that’s small comfort to the victims. The way Buffalo police handled a recent home invasion of a student apartment in University Heights might help explain why so few burglaries get solved.
Louis Rios and Matthew Ferguson, two college students, were sleeping in their first-floor flat on Minnesota Avenue at about 4:15 a. m. Aug. 5 when two thieves slipped into their apartment. The thieves headed to Rios’ bedroom at the rear of the house.
“I woke up in my bed with a gun to my head,” the 20-year-old Brooklyn native said. “The guy told me ‘If you move, I’m going to kill you.’
“I couldn’t see the gun, I felt it. It was a rifle or single-barrel shotgun. Then he started asking where the money was.”
Rios lay frozen in his bed, a pillow over his head, fielding a stream of questions from his assailant.
Who lived upstairs? Was there any weed in the house? And, repeatedly, where was the money?
The robbers moved from room to room, finally making their way to the front bedroom, a converted porch, where Ferguson was sleeping.
The 19-year-old Albany native said he was awakened to one burglar’s yells demanding money and the other tossing a poker set with 1,000 chips at him. One gunman then stuck a shotgun in his face, ordered him to lie on the bed, pillow over his head and arms outstretched, Ferguson said. Again came demands for money.
One gunman returned to Rios’ bedroom, emptied a two-liter bottle of pop on his back, then threatened to kill him when he reacted to the cold fluid.
The burglars, who wore hoodies that disguised their identity, then collected their booty and fled. Rios and Ferguson said the thieves made off with electronics worth about $4,500.
Twenty to 30 minutes of terror had passed.
The aftermath
Rios and Ferguson said they freaked a bit after the gunmen fled.
“After it happened, I realized I was robbed at gunpoint,” Ferguson said.
The gunmen had stolen both of their cell phones, and there was no land line in the house, so the two got in Ferguson’s car and headed to a Mobil convenience store several blocks away at Main Street and Winspear Avenue, where police frequently congregate at night. No police were there, however.
So they drove farther, trying to calm down and looking for a police car. They finally flagged one down on Parkside Avenue north of the Buffalo Zoo. The officer said Minnesota Avenue was in a different police district and that he would call for a squad car to respond to the scene.
Rios and Ferguson headed home.
Rios and Ferguson said one of the two officers who initially showed up sounded skeptical about their story.
“She said, ‘It looks like people had keys to get into the house,’ ” Rios said.
Added Ferguson: “I felt like they thought we did it.”
One officer checked out the exterior of the house, while the other wrote a report.
Here is the sum total of the report the officers filed:
“Complt [complainant] reports on above D/T/L [date, time and location] 2 B/Ms [black males] did enter house. Once inside did threaten complts with handgun demanding cash. Suspects did take 2 X Boxes video games and 1 laptop and complt’s cellphone. Complt cannot ID. There was no sign of force entering.”
Rios and Ferguson said they checked the house the following morning and discovered a screen ripped from a first-story window that looked like it was the point of entry. They also noticed trampled grass underneath the window and what looked like a palm print on the window.
“We did better investigating than the cops,” Ferguson said.
Besides missing the ripped screen, the officers’ report was incomplete and included inaccuracies, Ferguson and Rios said.
For starters, it listed Ferguson as Matthew Lee. Lee is his middle name. The abbreviated report sent out over the department’s computer network misspelled Rios’ last name.
The original report also failed to list most of the items stolen.
The report got two things right, Rios and Ferguson said. Their cells phones were taken, along with a laptop computer. But the rest of the report’s accounting was incomplete, they said.
The follow-up
Not only were XBox videos stolen, but the complete game consoles and controllers. A Wii game counsel was also stolen. Also taken were a wallet, car keys, an iPod, an MP3 player and a paint ball gun.
Two days later, police asked Rios and Ferguson to come to the police station on Bailey Avenue to provide a statement. Rios said he was discouraged by the conversation he had with Detective Norman Mourgas when he showed up to give his statement.
Rios said the detective shrugged off the crime, saying this was the time of year when student houses are broken into in University Heights.
“He said, ‘There’s nothing we can do — there was no breaking and entering,’ ” Rios said.
Rios said he asked if police could locate the thieves by using Global Positioning System tracking — which involves the satellite tracing of items embedded with the technology — to find the stolen cell phones.
“The detective said that takes too much time and money,” Rios said.
Rios said the final straw for him was the one-page statement that the detective typed as the result of his interview.
“There were typos left and right,” he said. “If someone was to grade that paper on grammar alone, he [the detective] would have failed.”
The detective responds
Police refused a request from The Buffalo News for the witness statements and other paperwork related to the crime, aside from the initial report filed by officers, saying the matter is still under investigation.
Robert Freeman, executive director of the state Committee on Open Government, said police are not legally entitled to make such a blanket denial for paperwork involving an ongoing investigation.
Mourgas, the detective, said he did not not treat the case lightly and said Rios has not gotten back to him with requested information, including the serial numbers of the stolen goods.
Rios said he hasn’t followed through because he’s convinced the police are not serious about pursuing the investigation.
“The cops didn’t do anything. Not a thing,” he said.
Where does the investigation stand?
Mourgas said he’s comparing the details of the break-in with burglaries in the neighborhood to see if they fit a pattern.
Why didn’t police dust the house for fingerprints?
The victims left the house unattended while they went in search of police, said Mourgas and Dennis Richards, chief of the Detective Division. They said that gap potentially compromised the integrity of the crime scene.
Richards and Mourgas didn’t have much to say when asked how leaving a house empty for an hour or two at 5 a. m. compromised the scene.
Sources familiar with the department’s practices said Buffalo police usually don’t dust for prints at a burglary scene unless a victim is seriously injured or killed.
Richards disputed that contention, saying prints are taken in more than half of all burglaries and in about three-quarters of home invasions such as the one experienced by Rios and Ferguson. He appeared to contradict himself when he also said that most burglaries involve garages and unoccupied houses, and police don’t take prints under those circumstances.
Buffalo police declined a request from The News to provide details of the workload of the units that dust for fingerprints at crime scenes.
As for not tracking the cell phones, Richards said that would have been the responsibility of the victim.
Buffalo in 2006 cleared 10.6 percent of burglary cases, according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Bureau of Justice Statistics. The national average for police departments in cities in Buffalo’s class — populations between 250,000 and 500,000 — is 11.4 percent.
Some police departments have more success than Buffalo’s. Pittsburgh’s, for example, made arrests in 23.6 percent of cases.
What’s the key to Pittsburgh’s success?
“Interviewing. Definitely interviewing,” said Sgt. Kevin Gasiorowski, head of the department’s 17-detective Burglary Unit.
“Everyone wants to go to homicide. But if you want to learn to be a detective, this is the best place to learn interviewing skills,” he said.
“We rarely have evidence on these suspects, so you have to become their friend and talk to them,” he said. “Detectives spend hours and hours talking to suspects, and eventually they break down.”
Putting it in context
Pittsburgh police are also aggressive about fingerprinting burglary scenes, including garages and vacant houses. Gasiorowski said more than 90 percent of all scenes are dusted for prints. A lag of even a couple of days doesn’t deter them from taking prints, he said.
Buffalo’s clearance rate also lags behind its largest suburban neighbor’s: Amherst made arrests in 23.8 percent of burglaries.
Amherst’s police handle things differently than Buffalo’s.
All burglary scenes are fingerprinted, said Amherst police Capt. Enzio Villalta, who made it clear he was discussing procedures in his department, not commenting on those in Buffalo. He said a house left unoccupied for an hour or two would not necessarily disqualify it from being dusted for prints.
As for GPS tracking, Villalta said that after getting permission from victims his department takes the initiative by contacting phone companies and other vendors to trace phones.
Rios and Ferguson moved out of their flat on Minnesota three days after the robbery. They remain upset about both the robbery and the police response.
“I was driving around the other day and saw a bumper sticker that said, ‘Pay Police Like Your Life Depended On It,’ ” Ferguson said. “The night of the robbery, I felt like my life depended on them, and they weren’t there.”
