A trio of juveniles tracked to North Jersey by Brick police detectives have been charged with several vehicle thefts and linked to an incident wherein 40 vehicles were burglarized and four stolen, police said Wednesday.
The thefts and burglaries occurred the night of Feb. 6 in the township’s Midstreams section, said Brick Police Sgt. Jim Kelly. Coordination with neighboring Point Pleasant police revealed that the suspects had driven the stolen vehicles to the Exxon station at the corner of Route 88 and Bridge Avenue, and after fueling up they left without paying.
Detectives Dan Waleski and Greg Mullarkey kept pursuing leads in the case in the months that followed. They discovered that the stolen vehicles went through the Union Toll Plaza on Garden State Parkway North at 6:45 a.m. that morning.
The detectives followed up on leads and were able to retrieve footage of a stolen vehicle on the surveillance cameras at a White Castle drive-thru lane in Irvington, Essex County. Three male juveniles were seen in the vehicle on camera, one of them tossing what are believed to be stolen credit and debit cards out the window, Kelly said.
With new information in hand, the two Brick detectives worked with the New Jersey State Police Auto Theft Task Force out of Newark and tied numerous vehicle thefts and burglaries throughout the state to the three juvenile suspects. On April 17, that task force concluded its investigations into dozens of cases with arrests of the three juveniles and accompanying delinquency complaints, Kelly said.
The names of the suspects, and their photos, were not publicly released.
