Amid a raft of home break-ins in the San Fernando Valley, a vigilant neighbor in Burbank foiled a burglary in progress over the weekend when they spotted two people dressed in black in someone’s backyard and called police, officials said.
A neighbor living near the 2700 block of Scott Road in Burbank called police around 7:20 p.m. Sunday after seeing two people dressed in black go into someone’s backyard then crawl into the house through a window, the Burbank Police Department said in a statement Monday. The caller also said they saw a suspicious car parked across the street.
Officers arrived minutes later and saw two people running from the house. Officers deployed a helicopter and set up a perimeter to track down the suspects, and eventually found them hiding in someone’s backyard. Both were arrested, but not without incident — one suspect initially refused officers’ commands and was bitten by a K9, officials said. A third suspect was arrested soon after inside a car matching the initial 911 caller’s description.
Alan Rodriguez-Pulido, 34, Wilmar Castelblanco-Robles, 20, and Cristian Rios-Cuadros, 24, were booked in Los Angeles County jail on residential burglary charges.
Just last week, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass announced measures to combat burglaries in the Valley, including putting in place extra patrols and using mobile license plate readers in high-risk burglary areas. She also used the opportunity to plug the budget for fiscal year 2026-27 her office released last week.
“We are deploying resources and acting strategically to halt this spate of burglaries and to catch the perpetrators,” Bass said in a statement on April 21. “This is why I have worked so hard to reverse the downward trend in the size of the LAPD. We need enough officers to act swiftly and strategically when crime patterns are revealed. This commitment to police hiring is reflected in the budget I released today.”
Commenting on the recent rash of burglaries, Bass said in a statement that the city busted a burglary crew last year that had been responsible for nearly 100 break-ins and that the Police Department is “once again deploying resources to identify, track, and arrest individual burglars and organized crews.”
So far this year, nearly 43% fewer burglaries and break-ins have been reported to the LAPD’s Valley Bureau compared to the same time period last year, according to Police Department statistics.