A preliminary hearing is scheduled for June 28 for a Missouri man charged with stealing a 2016 GMC Denali from the Lynch auto dealership in Burlington in October.
Joshua Walker, 41, of Kansas City, Mo., was charged June 12 in Racine County Circuit Court with burglary of a building or dwelling, criminal damage to property, felony theft of movable property valued at more than $10,000, operating a motor vehicle without the owner’s consent, felony theft of movable property valued at $5,000 to $10,000 and misdemeanor theft.
According to the criminal complaint, on Oct. 24, the Lynch service director reported that tires valued at $8,500 and a 2016 GMC Yukon Denali valued at $77,095 were taken from the lot. Security footage from the dealership shows a white vehicle travel west on the access road toward Lynch at about 3:10 a.m. that day, make a u-turn and drive back toward Browns Lake Road. A man is seen on the video walking along the north end of the dealership lot, breaking a window to gain access to the service area and removing a set of keys from a desk, according to the complaint. The man is seen on the video taking the license plate off the Denali that is owned by a customer and being serviced at Lynch, rolling tires from the showroom to the broken window and then driving the Denali to the broken window to load the tires, according to the complaint.
On the video, it appear the suspect isn’t able to load the tires through the broken window, so he drives the Denali to a different location, loads the tires and then drives the Denali off the lot toward Menards, according to the complaint.
The white vehicle that initially drove to the area was pulled over at about 4 a.m. the same day, and the driver identified himself as Brandon May but provided police with what officers believed to be false information about where he’d been, according to the complaint.
Police used cell-phone information to determine May and Walker had been in contact with each other the day of the burglary, according to the complaint. Phone contact between the pair stops for a period of time, which indicated to police they were in the same vehicle, and then resumes later, which supports the idea they were then in different cars, according to the complaint. During the time of the burglary, their cell phones pinged off towers that indicate they were in Burlington. Specifically, Walker’s phone pings off the Rowntree Road cell tower, supporting the idea that he was at Lynch at the time of the burglary, according to the complaint.
The Denali was recovered Dec. 13 by the Markham Police Department in Illinois. DNA evidence for Walker was recovered from cigarette butts in the Denali, and Walker matches the suspect in the surveillance video from Lynch, according to the complaint.
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