PHOENIX — A suspected burglar successfully hid from Phoenix police and evaded capture after he hid in an attic over the weekend.
The incident happened at Lisa Mullins' home near 47th Avenue and Thunderbird Road.
It was Saturday. She was out spending time with family for Mother’s Day weekend when around 6 p.m. a neighbor called and told her “a suspicious person was hanging around” their yard.
The neighbor captured a video of two people lurking around Mullins' property. One of them goes out of frame. The other jumps the cinder block wall and goes to the backyard.
“They took off the bolts of the doggie door and went in through there,” Mullins said. “We called the police, and they came and swarmed the house.”
Mullins said police took about an hour to arrive. At that time, their garage security camera captured a man snooping around. He ultimately used a string to pull down the attic stairs and hid there.
“They had the K9 dogs come in to try and find him and they couldn’t find him,” the homeowner said.
Police officers searched the house but found nothing.
Mullins and her husband were let back in their home, while police remained outside finishing up their work, she said.
“I began to relax when I heard a booming noise coming from my grandson’s room,” Mullins said. “I went in there and see the ceiling was just torn.”
The bedroom had two ceiling holes. One in the closet and the other just outside of it. Insulation and debris fell all over the carpeted floor and closet clothes.
Mullins and her husband ran outside and told the officers what had just happened, “telling them he was still in there, that he was in the attic.”
Police surrounded the home, and asked the man to come out, but he never did.
Officers went inside to search, but again “they didn’t see him, they think he just ran off,” Mullins said. “They told me they checked the attic too.”
After an hours-long search, Mullins and her husband were allowed into their home a second time, but the man police were desperately looking for was up in the attic the whole time.
Mullins remembers laying down on her bed, dozing off into sleep sometime after 1 a.m., now Sunday, when she “heard a boom and a thud.”
She called the police a third time. This time they arrived in a minute, she added.
“He was up there the whole time, [the man] knocked the vent off of the roof and went through the vent hole,” Mullins explained. “He jumped off the roof and over the wall and ran. Haven’t seen him since.”
Phoenix police said another person related to the owners was detained for trespassing when they first arrived on the scene.
The suspect allegedly got away in a car he had parked a block away.
Mullins is shaken up about the incident. Her home was her refuge. A place for security and peace, that has been invaded.
“I don’t sleep worrying about him coming back here,” she said. “I just feel like I’ve been violated and there’s no reason for it.”
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