WAUKESHA, Wis. (AP) — A group of teenagers believed to be from the Chicago area broke into a luxury car dealership in Wisconsin and drove off with nine vehicles worth more than a half-million dollars, police said.
Sunday’s heist at a Jaguar-Land Rover dealership in Waukesha was captured on surveillance camera footage showing nine masked suspects filing into the dealership before each drives off in a car in the city about 19 miles (30.5 kilometers) west of Milwaukee.
The video also shows one car being backed up and smashed through an overhead service door.
Waukesha Police Capt. Dan Baumann said the suspects broke into the dealership about 6 a.m. Sunday, found where its car keys were stored and then activated those key fobs to find the cars they stole.
“Nine subjects went out and throughout there looking for keys. One person finds where the keys were hidden and then starts to disseminate those to his friends,” Baumann told WISN-TV.
The nine vehicles are valued at more than $583,000, he said.
One suspect, a 17-year-old Chicago boy, was arrested Sunday in the southern Wisconsin community of Pleasant Prairie after the stolen vehicle he was driving crashed along Interstate 94 during a police pursuit. He was being held at the Waukesha County Jail on a $50,000 bond and faces burglary, theft and criminal damage to property charges, Baumann said.
Police said Sunday that the suspects are believed to be “an organized crime group of teenagers from the Chicago area.”
Baumann said Friday that all or most of the teen suspects are known to members of a police task force in southern Wisconsin and northern Illinois and police in that two-state region were still searching Friday for the eight other suspects.
Six of the nine stolen vehicles have been recovered — four in Chicago, one in the Chicago suburb of Deerfield, and one in Wisconsin after the highway crash that led to the 17-year-old’s arrest, he said.