Apartment complex targeted in vehicle burglaries

HOUSTON (FOX 26) - Broken glass is not what you want to see on the pavement next to your car, and yet there it was next to Sam Yu’s vehicle.

"How many windows?” I asked him. “ Umm. One. But I have two cars. My wife's car. A window got  smashed,“ he answered.

It all happened at the Upper Kirby Apartments at 2300 Richmond. All of the cars were parked inside a secured garage. Police say the first call came in at 3:45 a.m. and they kept on coming in -- roughly 50 cars in all.

"It was just like, I had a knot in my stomach. I mean nothing was taken so I was lucky there. But it just sucks," said Samantha Salvatora as she waved the glass repair truck into the garage.

HPD tracks cases like this on its website. They call them BMV's for "Burglary of a motor vehicle". Before this happened, the numbers had been going down steadily since August. But there is a catch. The crime often goes unreported. The bad guy is usually long gone. There's little need for a police report because a broken window costs less to repair than the typical insurance deductible. It's also not a priority call for police so you could be waiting for a while for them to arrive.

Police say anecdotal evidence on sites like Nextdoor and Facebook can make the problem to seem worse than it is.

What is odd about this series of break-ins is that you can't call whomever did this a thief or thieves. Apparently they didn’t get anything, but they did leave a mess and left victims scratching their heads.

"I don't know. I don't know what happened or the cause what was behind it, but nothing was taken. Just cars hit, which at the end of the day, was not a big deal as people being hurt or stuff being taken,” said one victim who asked not to be named.

Police have retrieved surveillance video from the garage and are going through it now.