'Uh oh! Let's go:' Listen to auto shop burglars who bolt after cell phone alarm goes off, need to be ID'd

WANTED IN SEATTLE –
Listen to the surveillance video below and you’ll hear a cell phone alarm freak-out a pair of burglars inside a Seattle auto shop. It seems the burglar wearing gloves and a hoodie triggered the phone himself. You see him touching it and checking it out just seconds before it goes off.

This was just before 3am on June 28th at Express Tires and Auto Service on the corner of S. Hudson St. and Martin Luther King, Jr. Way S. in the Columbia City neighborhood.

That phone going off caused the crooks to take off -- but not before they got their hands on two really expensive pieces of car mechanic equipment. "They actually got in through a broken window, around the side of the garage, they broke the window out, entered into the building. You're going to get pretty good shots of them kind of shopping around and they have lights on them, so they're kind of looking at things, you'll see a light shining on the floor. They're picking up things, looking to see what's valuable. They took some pretty high-end diagnostic equipment, that maybe they're mechanics, maybe they know how to get rid of them, I don't know? But, they're expensive. The victim in this case is pretty upset,” said Ret. Det. Myrle Carner with Crime Stoppers of Puget Sound.



The two high-end MaxiSys Diagnostic Analysis Systems cost thousands of dollars and are used to read Check Engine Lights and other error messages that come up on a vehicle's computer system.

"Perhaps you're a shop owner and somebody walked in saying, 'Hey, my uncle died. He left me these things. Do you have any use for them?' Maybe that's happened? Maybe they offered to sell them to you for like $100? Well, that ought to set off a red flag, so something like that happened to you, or somebody tried to sell it, or you see it on the Internet, or OfferUp, or any of those kinds of things, that's the kind of information we need to know,” said Ret. Det. Carner.

If you recognize them, know anything that can help identify them, or spot those MaxiSys systems being sold online, use the P3 Tips App on our phone to get the information to Crime Stoppers and Seattle Police, or call the hot line at 1-800-222-TIPS(8477). It's anonymous and a cash reward is yours if your tip helps lead to any arrests in the case.