Vehicle Break-Ins Around Palisades Escalate

By DAYNA DRUM | Reporter

It started out as any other Monday morning—just before the sun came up Scott Blakely went outside to grab the day’s newspaper with his dog, but it quickly devolved into something out a movie.

Blakely noticed someone in his Cadillac Escalade sitting in the driveway and someone else in his son’s girlfriend’s Range Rover parked across the street. He called out to whom he thought were his kids, but when two masked individuals slowly backed away from the previously locked vehicles, he reacted instinctually.

Blakely, along with his dog, ran after the fleeing suspects down the road screaming to his sleeping neighbors to call the police.

The male of the pair—Blakely suspects the other was female—turned to confront his pursuer and they began wrestling in the middle of the street.

The suspect pulled out some type of weapon, Blakely recalled, so he withdrew his own pocketknife and sliced at his opponent’s weapon-holding hand.

At this point Blakely’s son caught up with scuffle about a block from their Marquez Knolls home and tackled the man to the ground.

The suspect was restrained until the police arrived and took him to the hospital.

Pacific Palisades has experienced a large uptick in vehicle break-ins in all areas of the community. One common factor of the burglaries are unlocked cars, giving the alleged burglars easy access to spoils left plainly in view.

One of the most recent incidents was caught on security camera. It was a grainy black-and-white clip that flashed around the Palisades hundreds of time last week, shared, analyzed and hotly debated.

At first glance the subject could be a typical resident: blonde, lithe, confident in capri pants, maybe out for an evening stroll.

But then viewers were shocked as they watched the woman—who has been dubbed the Via de la Paz Prowler—walk up a sleeping house’s driveway and silently enter the car parked there. She spends a few minutes inside the vehicle and then exits with a bag on her shoulder and continues walking down the dark street.

After the security footage of the troubling incident, residents began sharing their own experiences with car burglaries. The story is often the same—in the morning hours from 2 to 5 a.m., a suspect walks brazenly onto a driveway, seemingly unfazed by security cameras and lights and enters the vehicle for no more than a few minutes.

While it is unclear if these suspects are unconnected, it is clear that the Palisades has been dubbed a ripe vehicle-hunting ground.