10-year-old boy spots burglary suspect who allegedly broke into his family's home at grocery store
After Ross Glass’s Florida home was burglarized, his 10-year-old son spotted the suspect at — of all places — the family’s local supermarket.
Glass’s Tampa house was the scene of a burglary on Saturday when a burglar broke in and stole a flatscreen TV, drone and laptop, among other things. Luckily, Glass, who is a real estate agent, has two security cameras in his home that the culprit never noticed, so the entire act was recorded.
He shared videos and photos of the burglar on social media hoping that would lead to an arrest. While the post was shared more than 1,300 times, all Glass really needed was his son, who saw the burglar at the grocery store the next day.
This is the POS that broke into my house while I was at my mother’s house with my boys for breakfast. Took a flatscreen,…
Posted by Ross Glass-Vega on Saturday, November 17, 2018
“Sunday we had different news crews coming through the house and at the end of the day we were hungry and decided to go to Winn-Dixie,” the father of three told Yahoo Lifestyle. “We were getting wings, and Kaleb pulls my shirt; he’s 10 years old, my oldest of the three, and he tells me, ‘Daddy, there’s the guy.’”
He figured the boy was crying wolf. “They are kids, so since it happened, everybody is like, ‘Oh, that could him.’ So it took me a couple of seconds, but when I looked over, it was a bit of a shocker; I’m looking at this guy and I’m going, ‘Oh, my goodness, this could be him.’”
Glass wanted to get a better look at the man. “The guy was moving around the grocery store, and we were waiting for some wings to get fried, so I left them there and said, ‘Don’t move.’ I went and just walked around and took a really good look at the guy just to make sure. It didn’t take long before I was certain.” Glass recognized not just his face but “the body language, how he walked, it was very obvious that it was the same guy.” He called the cops and went outside, leaving his children with someone who worked at the Winn-Dixie. “I waited outside because I didn’t want to risk him leaving before the cops got there. I was outside the grocery store telling 911 to hurry up.”
Soon enough, about 10 patrol cars pulled up. “They told me to stay a little bit out of sight; my main concern at that point was my children’s safety,” Glass recalled. But he was close enough to see it all unfold. “They rushed him, and there were cops all around him. And they walked him to his car, and I stayed back.”
The cops identified the man as Eric Rodriguez-Sanchez but explained to Glass that they didn’t have enough evidence to arrest him right away. “So watching him drive away in a new car that was less than five years old and didn’t even have a scratch … this guy that just broke into my house and took my stuff … watching him drive away was a little tough,” Glass recalled. “I do understand the process, but in my head, I was going, ‘This guy is gonna go and get rid of some of this stuff.’”
However, law enforcement officials arrested Rodriguez-Sanchez on Monday. But Glass still doesn’t have his belongings and hasn’t heard from the police about the case. “I need my laptop more than anything because I don’t have money to replace it right now.”
Glass still can’t believe they caught him so close to home. “It’s a pretty busy area that I live in, but the grocery store is literally no more than five minutes from the house,” he explained. “So he picked the grocery store that was closest to the house that he burglarized the day prior,” he said about Rodriguez-Sanchez’s mistake.
But without his son, he might not have even noticed they were in the presence of their alleged burglar. All of his sons are little detectives, it turns out. “They’re watching the latest version of Hawaii Five-0. That’s their favorite show,” Glass said. While his 6-year-old has been trying to catch the criminal since the burglary happened, Kaleb hadn’t shown as much enthusiasm; that was the first time he pointed anyone out.
But Kaleb chose the right time to play detective. And he’s proud. “He’s acting like a hotshot, and he thinks he’s gonna be popular in school now,” Glass said. “He wanted to get the Crime Stoppers $3,000 reward, but because of the way it went down, we didn’t qualify to get that. So he was a little bit disappointed because a lot of people were telling him he might qualify.”
Instead, Glass is just hoping they get their electronics back and that his children learn something from this experience. “I’m a single dad and I have them 50 percent of the time, so since this happened, we’ve talked about it, we’ve discussed it, and I turned some of it into a learning opportunity about bad guys and good guys and how we need to do the right thing.”
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