Residents worried after rash of car burglaries

ORANGE COUNTY, Fl. (WOFL FOX 35) - Robert Melendez wanted an extra layer of security and decided to put security cameras up around his home earlier this month.

He never expected that they would capture criminal activity just a few weeks later. The surveillance shows someone going through the neighborhood pulling on car doors, before getting into a car in Melendez’s driveway over the weekend.

“It’s around Christmas time, we know there’s a lot of bad things going on and we try to stay as safe as possible but for someone to come in and just go through your stuff and just check everything, it feels wrong,” he said.

Melendez says this all happened at around 7:00 a.m. Sunday morning on Bablonica Drive in Orange County.
FOX 35 talked to three other victims on the block, including Sandy Gallagher.

“It’s creepy! It’s really creepy,” she said.

What neighbors say makes the whole situation even creepier is that the person didn’t really take much. He just looked through their stuff and left it all out in their cars. 

“He had a stereo system that could have been easily taken and it wasn’t touched,” Gallagher said.

Melendez tells us the guy left behind a GPS and instead took his wife’s glasses. He says he filed a report with the Orange County Sheriff’s office and plans to talk to neighbors about how to make the area more secure.

“If he did it to us and he did it to other people, it’s better to just take them off the street because the next time it could be worse,” he said.

Neighbors tell us some of their doors were left unlocked. As a reminder, it’s always a good idea to lock up and keep valuables out of sight to keep thieves out.