VICTORIA -- Oak Bay police say a man broke into an apartment building and accessed two basement storage lockers after he "hot-wired" the building’s front door on Saturday.
According to police, the man opened the Oak Bay Avenue apartment’s intercom panel and "accessed wires that he hot-wired to open the door" to gain entry to the building.
He then used a pry bar to open the building’s basement door, where he went to a storage locker area and pried open two lockers. Investigators say that tools and hunting supplies were stolen from the lockers.
Surveillance video from the building captured footage of the man, say police. He is described as a white man with a medium build who was wearing a mustard yellow jacket, a black Nike baseball cap, blue jeans, white shoes and a black face mask.
Last week, Victoria police said there had been a recent spike in thieves using intercom systems to break into apartment buildings and parking garages.
VicPD says that roughly 24 of such break-ins have occurred over the past two months.
On Wednesday, a downtown Victoria resident told CTV News that his car was broken into at his apartment building after someone had accessed his building’s intercom.
Resident Tim Coulter says that after the theft, he checked his building’s surveillance footage and saw that a man had short circuited his building’s intercom so that it would restore to its default setting. He says the thief then set their own passcode and used that to open the building’s front doors.
"Break-and-enter suspects are actually breaking the front panel of these intercoms of multi-residential buildings," said VicPD Const. Cam MacIntyre on Wednesday.
To help prevent thefts, Victoria police recommend that apartment buildings lock interior doors that lead to parking or storage areas and that building management consider locking or putting bars over intercoms to avoid tampering.
