Alleged burglar picks on the wrong business

June 4, 2008 07:15 PM Email| Comments (0)| Text size – +

By Jillian Jorgensen, Globe Correspondent

HomeLogic, a company that offers high-end home control systems, wired their Marblehead offices with the same technology they offer their customers to demonstrate how the system can operate everything from your heat to your sound system to surveillance cameras.

Early Monday, though there were no customers in the store, the system put on quite a demonstration: it caught an alleged criminal.

“This guy decides to pick the only building in New England or North America that’s wired with this technology, so that’s the Darwin part,” said Joe Lautner, vice president of marketing and sales for the company.

Employees arrived Monday to find the glass front doors of the offices had been kicked in. They checked the surveillance video and found the break-in on tape at 3:09 a.m.

“There was a guy walking up, pressing his face up to the glass, looking around and then ... [he] starts kicking on the door and the door pops open,” Lautner said.

It was dark in the office, but the video was clear enough to show police what the burglar had touched so they could dust for fingerprints. It also gave them a general description of who they were looking for, Lautner said.

Police responded to a call later that day for a man sleeping near the side of a road, and officers realized the suspect matched the description of the man seen on the surveillance video.

The man, Francis Connor IV, 21, of Revere, went with police to the station and confessed to the burglary at HomeLogic and another business in Marblehead that morning, Marblehead Police said in a statement.

Connor faces a variety of charges, including breaking and entering at nighttime with intent to commit a felony, possession of a dangerous weapon, malicious destruction of property, larceny, and being a fugitive from a San Diego, Calif., burglary warrant, according to police.