Officers seek guns stolen from Houston stores during Harvey
A Glock 23 pistol. A .40-caliber Springfield XDM-40. A Ruger P95. Dozens of other handguns, shotguns and long rifles: all missing.
The Houston Chronicle reports , in a partnership with the Texas Standard, that as Hurricane Harvey inundated Houston, most people were just trying to stay safe. Cops were busy saving lives.
Across the city, however, crews of enterprising thieves used the disaster to break into gun stores and carry away 109 firearms – untraceable and easily sold.
Investigators from the Houston office of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives have so far recovered a half dozen of the weapons. Where are the rest?
That what’s Ryan Taylor wants to know. He oversees the agents tasked with hunting down the stolen weapons.
One thing is certain, he says: They’re crime guns now, and they’re not being used for good.
It was Sunday morning, Aug. 27, and much of Houston was underwater. At his home in Kingwood, Rob Elder sat at his kitchen table, wondering how high the water in his street would rise. Then the phone rang. Looters had broken into a Cash America pawnshop in the Houston Gardens area of northeast Houston, 20 miles away.
Elder, an investigator for First Cash Financial, which owns the Cash America chain, reached for his laptop and logged into the store’s surveillance video feed.
Thieves had smashed a window, broken through the security bars, and made their way inside. Debris littered the floor. Elder watched as blurry figures carried whatever they could get their hands on out into the murky, waist-deep floodwater.
