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Thursday, March 28
The Indiana Daily Student

crime & courts

Man arrested in connection with burglaries near campus

Police arrested a man Monday in connection with several burglaries in near-campus neighborhoods during IU’s winter break.

Don Perrus, 47, is charged with seven counts of burglary and one of theft from a vehicle.

Bloomington Police Department detectives investigating the burglaries connected Perrus to the case via stolen items found in pawn shops, BPD Capt. Steve Kellams said. At 7 p.m. Monday the detectives found Perrus in front of a storage unit on the 1000 block of West Allen Street.

He had stolen items on his person, and detectives found more stolen items in the storage unit. He was arrested and taken to the Monroe County Correctional Center.

When he was asked how many stolen items Perrus possessed, Kellams said there were too many to quantify.

“There’s a room full downstairs of stolen stuff,” he said.

The items are connected to burglaries that occurred on the 100 block of East Eighth Street, the 700 block of North Park Avenue, the 1300 block of North Washington Street, the 600 block of North College Avenue, the 1100 block of North Indiana Avenue, the 400 block of North Dunn Street and the 200 block of North Grant Street.

“Over the break he had been consistently targeting student housing areas, breaking in and committing these burglaries,” Kellams said. “Then he had been stealing these items and pawning them.”

The theft from a car took place on the 300 block of West 12th Street.

Each of the burglaries was committed via forced entry, Kellams said. That trend helped detectives differentiate the cases from ones where unlocked houses were burgled — white noise cases, as Kellams called them — and pinpoint a trend.

“When you get rid of that white noise, you start focusing on specific patterns, and when you focus on patterns, then you start making arrests,” he said.

Kellams said the arresting detective said Perrus admitted to spending a night in one of the homes. Though the arrest log lists an address on West Allen Street for Perrus, Kellams said he’s transient.

Perrus has pending theft charges in Johnson County and Owen County, according to the state’s case summary service, MyCase.

BPD is in the process of returning stolen items, mostly electronics and jewelry, to victims, Kellams said. Residents in these eight cases will be contacted to retrieve their belongings. For any leftover items, a crime analyst will search other past reports for connections to cases.

Perrus is also being investigated by BPD in connection to two other burglaries in the same time frame, Kellams said.

His bond is set at $20,000.

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