Good Samaritan 'fed up' with Montopolis vehicle burglaries

A long-time resident of the Montopolis neighborhood in Southeast Austin opened his truck to a familiar site over the weekend -- another vehicle burglary while his F150 was parked in his driveway.

“The back seat was leaning forward, the console was back, everything had been dumped,” said Delwin Goss, pointing to how he found his truck on Sunday morning.

He estimates just under $2,000 in power tools were stolen from behind the passenger seat of his Ford truck.

“They took everything that was in it,” said Goss as he flipped open an empty box of what used to be new wrenches.

To make matters worse for the nearly 25-year resident of Montopolis, he had just replaced his power tools after they were stolen three years prior -- almost the same exact way.

“It’s a g**damn shame when you can’t park in your own driveway,” Goss said.

Krimelabb statistics show reported vehicle burglaries have been on a decline over the past five years for the Montopolis zip code. The same goes for Austin.

However, in the past two months Krimelabb measures a spike in vehicle burglaries for the Southeast Austin neighborhood -- 16 were reported in June and 13 were reported in July.

Montopolis also had the fifth highest number of vehicles burglaries per square mile. Zip codes 78701 was first, 78758 followed and 78752 was third.

“In this neighborhood, you have to chain everything down,” said Goss. "I'm mad, I'm fed up and I'm tired of it."

Goss said he’ll never park his truck outside his gate ever again mainly because he helps wire homes for low income families with Habitat for Humanity all around Central Texas.

The trailer he brings to job sites, he said, has been robbed three different times while he’s live in Austin. Now it sits by his bedroom window but even that doesn’t make him the peace of mind he feels he should have in the neighborhood he’s lived in for nearly 25 years.

“It’s made it a lot harder for me to do my job,” he said.

Going forward, Goss said he plans to make flyers to pass out to pawn shops around town with a $500 reward. He said he hopes the driver’s license number he wrote on all of his stolen power tools will help pawn shops determine they were stolen.