Jennifer Blommel didn't realize her purse was missing until she returned to the office and was unloading bags of food for a potluck lunch. She jumped in her Honda Civic and raced back to the Publix, still hoping the handbag was in a shopping cart or safely in the hands of a supermarket employee. Someone will have returned it, she thought; it's what any decent, honest person would do.
The Publix managers scrambled around, checking every cart. No purse. The reality soon sunk in: It had been stolen. Jen made a mental checklist, her stomach starting to churn. Thirty bucks in cash. Gone. There was all the stuff she'd have to replace – cell phone, wallet, driver's license and the like – plus canceling credit and ATM cards.
Oh, and the gift cards, the ones she'd gotten for Christmas from her family – from places like Target, Home Depot and Best Buy. What was it, about $400 worth?
She called the Tampa Police Department.
On Feb. 2, at the Publix on Morris Bridge Road in North Tampa, Jennifer Blommel, a 31-year-old supervisor for a customer service call center, was the victim of what is commonly called a property crime. Most of us have been, or will be, hit by such a crime. It could be something as damaging as a big-dollar swindle, as harrowing as a burglar breaking in and stealing that heirloom necklace, or as annoying as having a purse ripped off from a shopping cart. A property crime happens in Florida every 42 seconds.
It's the major crimes that make headlines – grisly murders, abductions, corporate fraud. But what of the small stuff, where the victims are violated but probably not devastated? It's not as if the cops roll out the CSI team or put out APBs for petty thefts. Do they end up in a dead file, languish in a database somewhere? Do the cops give a shit? And if so, how do they investigate?
This is the story of a property crime, from the thief's first move to the close of the case.
Robert Lewis was shopping at Publix about the same time as Jennifer Blommel. He spent $30 or so, using his girlfriend's ATM. Life had been kicking the 44-year-old around some. He was going through a divorce, and had been let go from his job at USF. Walking to his car, he saw a purse in the cart next to it. It'd been a while since he'd had any cash of his own to speak of. And here, suddenly, was an unattended purse within reach.
He grabbed the pocketbook, hopped in his car and drove off. The neophyte thief rifled through the contents, pocketed the cash, and discovered a small stack of gift cards.
While Jennifer gave a report to TPD, her boyfriend, Jeff Reardon, started calling her cell phone – over and over and over. Finally, surprisingly, a man answered. He was in Morris Bridge park, he explained, and heard a phone ringing, tracked it down to a purse in a trash can and answered it. Reardon asked the man if he could meet him somewhere and retrieve the purse. The man offered instead to drop it off at Andover Place Apartments, where Jennifer lived.
Relieved, Jennifer dashed to the office, where a Good Samaritan, she presumed, had left it in a plastic Publix bag. But when she went through the handbag, she found that the cash and gift cards were gone. Jennifer asked the office person what the man looked like: just under 6 feet, with curly, blondish-brown hair and glasses.
She returned to her apartment and started calling credit card companies. It hadn't occurred to her to write down the serial numbers on the gift cards. There was no way to track them. Then she remembered she'd used one at Target. She dug out the receipt and called the 800 number. The customer service person told her the balance was $37. That was wrong, Jen claimed; it was more like $90. She asked when it changed. 12:55. She looked at the time. It was 12:56.
She phoned Target and asked if someone could pull the video for that register. The security manager called back later that day and said he'd definitely gotten the guy on tape: A white male with wavy hair and glasses.
Somewhere, somehow, somebody got tough on crime. Since 1993, the national property crime rate has dropped 49 percent, similar to the reduction in violent crime. According to FBI statistics, property crime peaked in 1975 at 553 per 1,000 households. It has steadily declined since. In 2003, the last year stats were available, 163 out of every 1,000 households were hit by a nonviolent theft.As much as the situation has improved, though, there still exists a strong chance that we'll all be stung by such a crime during our lifetime. For instance, from '85-'02, 1.9 property crimes were committed for every man, woman and child in Tampa – enough for every resident to have been victimized twice.
When Jennifer Blommel was 7, thieves looted the house where she lived with her parents and two siblings. In its aftermath, she could only watch as her parents burglar-proofed the home. This time, however, her reaction would be different.
"I was so upset, I said I was going to find this guy in any way, shape or form," Jennifer says. She had finally convinced her family not to give "trinkets" for Christmas, that the gift cards were much more useful. Neither she nor her boyfriend came from well-to-do backgrounds. Moms, dads, brothers and sisters had chipped in to buy the cards. That $375 worth of plastic represented her whole Christmas. Jennifer's folks were understanding when she told them the cards had been stolen from her purse that she'd left in a shopping cart, but she was still embarrassed.
On Feb. 9, a week after Robert Lewis took the purse from the cart and used the gift card to buy some clothes at the Target on Fletcher Avenue, he returned to the same store and brought a $13.99 potted plant to the register. He produced the gift card, but the clerk told him it had been canceled and threw it in the trash. Lewis then paid with his girlfriend's ATM. It probably never occurred to him that the entire transaction, as well as the one the week before, had been videotaped.
Meanwhile, TPD told Jennifer that her case had been transferred to the Hillsborough County Sheriff's Office because, while the theft had occurred in the city, the card had been illicitly used in the county.
She called Target back, and security discovered that the person who'd bought the plant was in fact the same curly-haired, bespectacled man who'd used her gift cards a week before. She now had two pictures of the same crook using her stolen cards, but she couldn't get her hands on them; only law enforcement could.
She wasn't getting any love from the sheriff's department. "The deputy who had the case, I left seven messages with him," Jennifer says in her high, chirpy voice. "When he finally called back, he said in his professional opinion it was not his problem. I said, 'Four hundred dollars may not seem like a lot to you, but it's a whole lot to me.' I needed someone to pick up the tapes, but he said Tampa Police should've handled this from the beginning. I was very aggravated."
Weeks went by. Jennifer again contacted TPD and explained the situation. She had a face, twice. Her complaint ended up with Sgt. Bill Rousseau, head of the District Two Latent Investigations Squad, which handles property crimes.
Originally, the case had not been referred to a detective because it simply did not meet the criteria: the theft of $5,000 or more, or a "probative lead," something concrete that would give an investigator a solid chance of solving the crime.
Essentially, Jennifer Blommel, by working with Target security, had generated that probative lead. Rousseau turned over the case to Bob Baxter, a 10-year TPD veteran who's been a detective for the last two. The crime occurred in his territory, the large, northernmost expanse that includes Tampa Palms and New Tampa. The purse theft landed on his desk about two months after it was committed. He had a face, twice, but no name.
Pop culture has etched a lineup of detective archetypes in our collective psyche: the cynical curmudgeon; the slickster; the cerebral analyst; the callow newcomer; the hardboiled head-breaker; the corrupt burnout.Bob Baxter fits none of these. The 48-year-old native of small-town Kentucky is an easygoing sort, which is accentuated by just a hint of a Southern twang in his voice. With his roundish face, thick gray hair, neat mustache and benevolent brown eyes, he's the last guy you'd expect to tune up a perp with a phonebook. About 5-foot-10, he carries a slight paunch, favors colorful print ties and regularly wears a pair of smart, two-tone brown bucks.
This is a man who tries to eat lunch as often as he can with his wife of 11 years, Josephine, who's a detective in the Sex Crimes unit downtown. She grew up in New Jersey, one of 17 kids in a Puerto Rican family. The Baxters live in Forest Hills with their 7-year-old twins, a boy and a girl, and a teenage daughter from Josephine's first marriage. When the couple does manage to catch a bite, they stop before eating, hold hands and bless the food. Devout Baptists, the Baxters hold Bible study in their home. They've been to Cuba three times on Christian missions.
"Bob's a very smart individual," says Sgt. Rousseau. "His strength is in higher economic crimes 'cause he can handle things like bank records. He's not a bull in a china shop; he's able to get the job done quietly, in the background. That's why he's good at heavy economic crimes – you don't want to make a lot of noise, bullying people. He comes off as very professional. He's never gonna play the bad cop, but he gets people to talk by being unthreatening."
Baxter did not initially gravitate to law enforcement. He attended a Baptist seminary in New Orleans, planning to be a theology professor, but decided against it. He married and settled in Gonzalez, La., near Baton Rouge, where he made inquiries into law enforcement. With the oil business going bust in the '80s, nothing was remotely available.
He and his first wife relocated to Land O' Lakes in '86; they divorced the following year. After finding out that TPD was in the throes of a hiring freeze, Baxter ran through a succession of jobs at small, independent hotels in Tampa. Cops used to come around one such establishment because, Baxter figures, of its reputation for clean restrooms. That's where he met Josephine.
The couple married in '93, and because the department looks favorably on family members for employment, it gave him a scholarship to the police academy at HCC, along with $250 a week (most people pay their own way, and then apply to the force).
His first beat was Six Mile Creek, followed by College Hill, Sulphur Springs and other tough neighborhoods. In 2003, he was loaned to the District 2 property crimes unit for 90 days. By the end of that assignment, he'd passed a test and made detective. He stayed in the same squad.
Occasionally, Baxter says, "I could use a little more excitement, like when I was on patrol, but I like the idea of putting a case together and stopping someone from stealing."
Jennifer Blommel's purse theft joined more than 50 other cases assigned to Bob Baxter. They ranged from a rash of break-ins in Tampa Palms, to a grift being run on the Korean community, to a guy who walked into his ex-girlfriend's garage and punched the new boyfriend in the face (which, by the way, is considered burglary: entering a dwelling with intent to commit a crime).He still managed to call Jennifer the day he caught the case, and she ran down the details. "I explained to her that even though Target had this guy on tape for her not to get overly optimistic," he says. "Just knowing what a guy looks like doesn't mean we can figure out who it is."
Baxter met with the Target security man and asked him to run the video of the second purchase all the way through. "Sure enough, after the gift card was turned down, he pulls another card out of his wallet and runs it through the machine," Baxter says with an incredulous chuckle. "This guy's not the sharpest tool in the shed. That's when I asked them for a printout of the transactions."
Baxter also walked away that day with another video capture of the curly-haired man leaving the store after his first purchase. It was the clearest image of the thief yet.
The detective now had a face, three times, and an ATM card number. After a few days, Target got back to him with the banking information. Inexplicably, it was issued from a Brazilian bank. Tracking down an account holder from a South American bank posed a litany of international jurisdiction issues. It was not a lead he would follow. A chill had come over the case.
Then an idea flashed into Baxter's head. What if the perp had used his ATM card at Publix the same day he ripped off the pocketbook? "It was my belief that the guy had been at Publix at the same time the victim was," Baxter explains. "Publix was able to show a use of that card at that store within five minutes of her having her purse stolen."
This time, the ATM account number indicated it was issued by the USF Credit Union. (Baxter's best guess about the Brazilian bank mystery is that a digit was wrongly inputted at some point along the way.) He got a subpoena to look at the credit union's records for that account number. On Thursday, April 21, he drove his gray Taurus to USF and had them trace activity going back to Feb. 2. Yes, there had been a purchase at Publix. The card was in a woman's name.
"I was just hoping it wasn't a stolen card," Baxter says, "'cause then if I called the lady and she had no idea who this guy was, it would be a complete dead-end."
The next morning, Baxter applied what he calls a bit of "creative truthfulness." He called the card bearer and told her he was "investigating some fraud involving ATM cards and had seen a video of a man using her card. I wanted to make sure that she was not being victimized. She told me it was OK. It was her significant other, Robert Lewis. She said he lived with her."
Face, number, name. Now it was time to see if they matched. Baxter punched Robert Lewis and his address into the Driver and Vehicle Information Database. Up popped the face: curly hair, glasses. The same face. Detective Baxter had probable cause for an arrest.
"You can't be a glory seeker and work in property crimes," says Sgt. Rousseau, 53, a 28-year TPD vet. "You'll end up disappointed. You have to pretty much be a stable individual and get satisfaction from the job no matter how cases turn out."Rousseau works out of District 2 headquarters, right across 30th Street from Busch Gardens; you can see the rollercoasters from the parking lot. In a windowed office adjacent to a spacious room of neat cubicles, Rousseau supervises the seven-person unit that handles larcenous activity – burglaries, bunko, petty thefts, auto break-ins – in the area north of Hillsborough, east of Armenia. Each squad member is assigned a specific geographic sector.
Every morning, Rousseau goes over a computer list of property crimes culled from reports by uniformed officers – on an average day about 30 come in. He then decides which ones get referred to a detective – generally about half.
His absolute No. 1 criteria: solvability. "I don't send them something they can't successfully conclude," he says. "So I expect a 100 percent return."
Most important, he's looking for that probative lead. Let's say someone pinches $500 worth of tools out of your shed and you file a police report. If a Tampa beat cop investigates and finds nothing more than an empty spot where the toolbox used to be, this crime will not get referred to a detective. If, however, someone discovers a wallet with an ID in it nearby, such a case will likely end up with a plainclothes cop.
No matter how selective Rousseau is when assigning cases, though, he knows not all of them will be cleared. "When I took over [in January], the department worried about case clearances," he says. "What percentage of cases did you successfully conclude at the end of the month? That was just playing with numbers. It's voodoo. For one thing, very few cases are closed in the same month. So I got with the majors [at the three city districts] and suggested we quit doing that, that we assign cases based on solvability and whatever we get back we get back. In my mind, the only successful conclusion is an actual arrest, or a warrant for an arrest."
Rousseau says the department no longer keeps case clearance stats. "We go by how many people each detective puts in jail," he says. "If I assign you 20 cases this month and 20 were put in jail, hallelujah. If you didn't put but one person in jail, we're gonna talk. Eleven or 12, you're doing good."
Eventually, every case gets closed, be it solved or unsolved. With Rousseau's approval, detectives decide when a dead-end investigation should be deactivated. Occasionally, a case will be reopened if a solid lead pops up.
Part of Rousseau's job is to keep his troops pumped up and aware of the importance of their work. They don't make headlines like homicide sleuths; it's not often that the adrenaline really flows. "They have to understand that an arrest is an arrest," he says, "that their victims are no less important than robbery victims."
At 1:32 p.m. Friday, April 29, Baxter headed north toward Thonotosassa. He radioed dispatch and requested a uniformed officer to meet him at the Shell Station on Dona Michelle Road. A few minutes later, patrolman John Touchton pulled up. Although the chance of Robert Lewis resisting or fleeing was very slim, Baxter would need a uniformed cop to ferry their new bust to central booking at the Orient Road Jail. Still, they'd need a bit of luck: Robert Lewis would have to be home in the middle of a Friday afternoon. Baxter briefed Touchton, and the two-car caravan drove to the address, with Baxter occasionally checking a Mapquest printout. The detective explained that he intended to ask Lewis some questions before slapping on the handcuffs, in hopes of getting him to incriminate himself or, better yet, confess.
The neighborhood consists of spacious lots and roomy but basic trailer-style houses. Two cars sat in the driveway, along with a bike that lay on its side. "Ah, no, kids," Baxter muttered. "I hate doing this when kids are in the house."
With Touchton a few steps behind, Baxter knocked on the screen door. Robert Lewis, lounging on a stuffed sofa watching TV, was visible from the stoop. A young man sat catty corner to him. Lewis appeared at the door looking sheepish. Wire-rim glasses framed his small, wide-set eyes. His hair was a bush of brown and copperish blond. He was wearing a faded print golf shirt, khaki jeans rolled up at the ankles and sandals.
"How you doing, Mr. Lewis? Bob Baxter, Tampa Police Department. Can we come in and talk to you for a minute?" the detective said, his manner disarming and friendly.
"Sure, come on in," Lewis replied, the quiver in his voice belying his intended bravado. The young man in the living room turned out to be Lewis' 18-year-old son, and Baxter asked him if he'd mind going elsewhere in the house.
Seated on the couch facing Lewis, Baxter said, "Before we do this, let me go ahead and read you that Miranda thing you always hear on TV. We cops like to do that. It keeps everything honest and above board."
The detective pulled a card from his wallet and read, "You have the right to remain silent…"
With each line, the furrows in Lewis' brow seemed to deepen.
"Is it OK if we ask you some questions?" Baxter asked, as folksy as could be.
"Well, I'd like to know what it's about," Lewis replied.
"I want to ask you about an incident that occurred almost three months ago. You returned a purse to an apartment complex. Tell me about that."
"Well, when I was going out, uh, over, um, Morris Bridge Road, I was over there, and, uh, 'cause I go out to ride my bike a lot. And I heard this phone going off in this trash can. I kept hearing it…"
Lewis was having difficulty finding his breath. A housecat sauntered up, looked up at him as if waiting to be picked up, then walked past. Baxter asked for some more detail, and Lewis made another hapless pass at telling his story of finding the cell phone.
"The morning you were riding your bike," Baxter broke in, "had you been anywhere else, done anything else?"
"OK," Lewis said, nearly breathless. He paused and looked down for several seconds. "This is a tough time for me right now…"
"OK," Baxter prodded.
"'Cause I'm going through a divorce…"
"This is where we're going to get real with this and start talking about what happened at the Publix?" Baxter parried.
"Yeah, I took the purse at the Publix in the parking lot."
Confession secured, Baxter ran through the details of the crime with Lewis. "An opportunity presented itself and you took advantage," Baxter said consolingly to Lewis, who was facing downward rubbing his eyes. "You didn't set out that morning to steal something and I appreciate that."
Baxter asked Lewis if he had any prior convictions; none had shown up in the state database. One time, long ago, a small thing, Lewis mumbled. Baxter said that, while it was ultimately up to the courts, Lewis was probably a good candidate for pretrial intervention, which would likely constitute probation, community service and making restitution to the victim. Most important, it could keep a third degree felony conviction off his record. Baxter stressed the value of admitting his guilt and expressing remorse.
The detective then asked if Lewis still had any of the gift cards. Several remained in his wallet; cop and perp did a quick inventory. Twenty minutes after arriving, it was time for the cops to transport Robert Lewis to jail. But first there was the matter of his son. He emerged from a bedroom. "They're going to take me to the, uh, jail house," Lewis said meekly. The kid's eyes grew wide.
"I found a purse and took a couple of the gift cards out of it and I used 'em," Lewis explained haltingly. The young man stood stunned, speechless.
"It's not gonna be a major thing," Baxter added.
The cops asked the son to leave the room, then Lewis rose and Touchton applied the cuffs, with their distinctive "click, click, craaaaank." As Lewis walked across the lawn toward the squad car, his eyes scanned the neighborhood. No one was in sight.
Touchton politely explained how the ride in handcuffs would be more comfortable if he sat sideways. After finishing up some paperwork on the hood of the cruiser, the patrolmen eased out of the neighborhood with Robert Lewis sitting pensively in the backseat.
There was one more bit of business. Baxter whipped out his cell phone, called Jennifer Blommel and made arrangements to meet her in the lobby of her office building. He was just minutes away.
The two greeted each other; it was the first time they'd met. Baxter explained that the curly-haired man had been arrested and was on his was to Orient Road Jail, that his name was Robert Lewis. Then he reached in his pocket and, with a smile, flashed a cache of gift cards. Jennifer let out a giddy gasp and hugged the cop.
Baxter explained that she was due restitution for her loss, but that the man who pinched her purse would probably not do jail time. Jennifer seemed OK with that. "It's a temptation; clearly he knew better, but you can see people falling into the temptation," she said.
"His 18-year-old son had to watch him carted off to jail today," Baxter said. "Hopefully, it was an object lesson learned."
"He's probably going through a lot right now," Jennifer replied, but quickly added, "I'm not saying he doesn't deserve the punishment."
After a brief bit of housekeeping on the gift cards, Baxter handed them to her. As he turned to leave, Jen gave him another quick hug.
Heading south in the Taurus, the detective mused, "Four hundred dollars worth of gift cards is not a major crime, but how do you say one victim's more important than another? When you hear police talking about 'I do it 'cause I like to help people,' that's where it comes in."
It was pushing 4 p.m. on Friday. With less than two hours left on his shift, Bob Baxter was flush with good feeling as he headed into the weekend. Smiling, he said, "That's the best I've felt for a victim in a while."
Eric Snider reported this story by shadowing Detective Baxter and interviewing the principals. Robert Lewis declined to comment.
This article appears in May 18-24, 2005.