Additional charges have been filed against a trio of alleged auto thieves accused of not only stealing vehicles from Brownsville but other areas of the Rio Grande Valley as well and taking them into Mexico.
The charges were filed by the McAllen Police Department and the Texas Department of Public Safety, said Investigator Martin Sandoval, spokesman for the Brownsville Police Department.
McAllen police filed two counts of theft of a motor vehicle against the men and the DPS filed one count of theft of a motor vehicle.
Total bonds are as follows: Jose Delgado, 24, $172,500; Roel Rubalcava, 25, $182,000; and Jonathan Balderas, 19, $187,500. The men are from Houston and were expected to be transported to the Carrizalez-Rucker Detention Center in Olmito sometime on Friday.
Sandoval said it’s possible that more charges could be filed against the men if other cities are able to connect them to auto thefts in their cities.
The vehicles being stolen are GMC trucks, Chevrolet trucks, Fords and Jeeps, Sandoval said. “That is the extent of their criminal activity. These people were prepared. They were actually prepared to do whatever it is that they needed to do to get these vehicles…the only thing they didn’t plan was for Brownsville police,” he said in an earlier interview.
The police department’s auto theft task force noticed that there was a string of auto thefts that had occurred within the past two weeks, Sandoval said. The task force switched their working hours into the afternoon and evening hours to see if they could catch the thieves. “It wasn’t happening in the morning. It was happening in the afternoon and during the night,” he said.
The thefts were occurring in the Sunrise Mall parking lot.
The group had a key coder and would go sit in the parking lot of Sunrise Mall until they saw a vehicle “they liked,” he said. “They kind of used a scanner to scan the frequencies of the alarm systems and then once they do that, they have a computer, and they have a little module there where they can code their own keys,” Sandoval said.
The alleged thieves carried their own keys that they could insert into the module to make fit into the vehicle they planned to steal, he said.
“They would hook up the computer to one of their computers to bypass all security things and then turn it on, and then within three to five minutes they had a vehicle without breaking a window, without breaking a steering column, with a key and they would take them into Mexico,” Sandoval said.
Police are waiting for a judge to sign a search warrant for the computer that the alleged thieves were using which could possibly provide them with information on the vehicles they were coding. “That is basically like that black book.”
Police got their break on Halloween when they spotted a white Chrysler 300 circling the area where vehicles had been stolen, Sandoval said. The task force was able to get video from the Sunrise Mall area, where some of the vehicles were taken from, and noticed the same Chrysler parked next to each vehicle that had been reported stolen.
A task force member in an unmarked patrol car started to follow the Chrysler and called for a marked patrol car for assistance. Although the marked patrol car tried to conduct a traffic stop on the Chrysler, the driver took off and fled from the location at a high speed, Sandoval said.
The chase of the Chrysler was called off because the driver was heading into a neighborhood where children were trick-or-treating. As soon as the vehicle left the neighborhood, another marked patrol car chased it. The vehicle fled again and struck several marked vehicles, Sandoval said. The suspected auto thieves fled but were arrested and taken into custody, he said.
“One of our agents actually did go to training for the key coding and as soon as he saw that in the vehicle he said ‘this is big. This is not normal from your car thieves,’” Sandoval said.
