HOUSTON – It's happening every day in Houston and surrounding areas: Homes, cars and even businesses are being broken into and burglarized.
The thieves make off with valuable goods, and some are never recovered.
This past December, Luis Garcia became a victim of property theft at his Garden Oaks home.
“We have a little house in the back. I notice the door is, like, open completely, and I'm thinking, 'I definitely didn't do that,' that and I know no one else would leave that open,” he said. “I go in, and the whole space just feels empty, and I'm thinking, 'Oh, God, yeah, something is definitely missing.' My heart sank, and my bike I use every day at school is gone. We had a TV mounted on the wall that was gone."
According to Constable Alan Rosen, of the Harris County Precinct 1 Constable's Office, what happened to Garcia is an all too common occurrence.
“It's just something that's part of our daily routine, having property crimes, things stolen -- bicycles, people’s houses getting broken into, cars getting broken into,” Rosen said.
Rosen said even when property is recovered, law enforcement officers still sometimes have a hard time returning items to their rightful owners because the items don’t always have serial numbers or other identifying markers.
“It helps us tremendously to potentially return your stolen items if we have something we can go on,” Rosen said.
ProtechDNA promises to be the answer to helping law enforcement solve property theft crimes.
Rosen agrees.
“It's a game-changer from the perspective of, we're now going to have markings and something that we can go on to tie it back to the person that actually owns the items,” Rosen said.
The way it works is pretty simple. ProtechDNA works with the insurance companies to provide the kits to the public for free, even if you don’t have insurance. All you have to do is just pay the shipping.
It comes with three different ways to mark your property and register items to you. There’s this property pen, which is invisible to the naked eye; these stickers; or these tiny specks of “DNA,” which resemble glitter and bear a serial number tied back to your account.
“It almost looks like jewelry, but it’s actually a piece of metal that has a number on it. I know the technology, and it’s unique to the owner of this box,” Rosen said.
We marked several items with ProtechDNA, and Rosen got to work seeing if he could identify them by their special markings.
“This is what they would do (when investigators examine stolen property). They scatter it out and kinda look for serial numbers and inspect the property and do all that kind of stuff,” he said.
He examined one of the items that had been marked with the invisible property pen.
“It almost looks like somebody just kind of accidentally wrote something on the back of this iPad, so it wouldn’t really stand out (to thieves)," he said.
With the special light provided by the company, he scanned item after item and was able to identify the ones we’d marked. Then, with a quick check of the ProtechDNA database, the items came back to the registered owner.
“The single best day for a law enforcement is solving a crime. That's what their job is, that's like finding the cure,” Rosen said.
Garcia didn’t have his bike’s serial number, and the bike shop lost its records as a result of Hurricane Harvey. So, for now, he holds out hope someone has seen his bike with the pink brake cable and contacts law enforcement. He also has pictures and videos of the bike, but he admits he wishes he would have known about ProtechDNA sooner.
“That would probably help the officer I reached out to identify my bike and maybe get it back to me sooner. I wish I had that on my bike,” Garcia said.
Rosen likes the technology so much, he reached out to the company to get DNA kits for residents in his area. For information on how to get a free kit through Precinct One, click here.
To order your own kit directly from ProtechDNA, click here.