An “organized” ring of car thieves, believed to be all teenagers, broke into a Wisconsin luxury car dealership last weekend and drove out with eight of the dealership’s vehicles and another in the service department belonging to a customer.
Waukesha Police captured one of the thieves, 17-year-old Calvin Valentine, after he crashed the Range Rover he’d stolen at the end of a 40-mile chase, WITI reported.
By mid-week, six of the nine stolen vehicles had been located, four of them in Chicago, about 100 miles away.
According to video provided to police, the suspects arrived in a stolen minivan at about 6 a.m. and pushed their way through a service door.
“Nine subjects went throughout there looking for keys,” Waukesha police Capt. Dan Baumann told WISN. “One person finds where the keys were hidden and then starts to disseminate those to his friends.”
According to the complaint against Valentine, one of the suspects took a Land Rover Velar and “used this car as a battering ram and drove it through the garage door, causing substantial damage to the vehicle and the door,” WITI said. They left that vehicle behind and took a second Land Rover, driving it through the same door. That vehicle was recovered in Chicago at about 8:30 a.m. that morning.
Later, police in West Allis, about 15 miles from Waukesha, got a tip from a caller about a group of vehicles traveling in a pack, the people inside with faces covered. West Allis police found them, and the cars jumped onto Interstate 894. Wisconsin Department of Transportation cameras captured much of the chase, until the 2021 Land Rover-Range Rover Westminster driven by Valentine crashed, WISN reported.
Valentine reportedly admitted to police he’d stolen the car but he did it just “doing kid stuff” and “did not know what people would do with those cars.” He also claimed he never stole a car before.
Along with the Westminster Valentine was driving, the thieves took a 2023 BMW X5 M50i, a 2021 Jaguar F Type R-Dynamic, a 2023 Range Rover Sport P440, a 2019 Porsche Macan, 2 2024 Range Rover Velars, a 2024 Land Rover Discovery Dynamic, and a 2020 Land Rover-Range Rover. The cars were worth a total of $583,339.
The other eight car thieves were still at large earlier this week.
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[Featured image: WISN screenshot]
