(NEWS 8) - A Rancho Santa Fe family is offering a $10,000 reward for anyone with information that leads to an arrest of at least two men who burglarized their home while they were away this weekend.
It could be an easy payday for you, considering the family's advanced security camera system, installed less than a month ago, captured the perps in the act and revealed some interesting details of the apparently premeditated crime.
"This wasn’t just some random thing where they come smash a window, grab something and go. They’ve done this before,” Andrew Kaperonis, the son of the homeowners, said.
Kaperonis was out with his family on Friday night when he got an alert on his home security app at around 5:45 p.m. The moment he saw that lights were on inside the home, he knew something was wrong.
By the time eight separate San Diego County Sheriff's Department cars responded to the house, and long before Kaperonis himself could get there, the burglars had left with thousands of dollars worth of jewelry and other property as well as priceless family heirlooms.
Kaperonis said that security footage reveals several subtle clues that suggest the burglars who hit his home weren't first-timers.
"He's got a headset on, he's talking on the phone the whole time and there's a getaway car," Kaperonis pointed out, suggesting that the two suspects who entered his home had been in contact with the driver of what looked like a light-colored, late-model BMW X5 with covered plates that appeared in the surveillance footage.
The suspects' body language and mannerisms as they crept through the halls lead Kaperonis to believe that burglars weren't totally sure that they were in an empty home, and that it didn't bother them.
"We don't know if they had firearms but they were prepared for someone to be in the house. The way that you see them slowly walk down the hallway and, you know, peeking through the room to see if anybody was there," Kaperonis said, in a color-commentary-style analysis of the security footage. "They were ready for someone to be in the house -- I don't know what they would've done but they were ready for it."
Eight minutes was all it took for the two men to enter through a broken window and gather their lucrative haul. Kaperonis said he's just thankful that nobody was home.
The family has kept their spirits up despite the loss of property, though. One detail of the crime that gets a laugh out of Kapernois and his parents is the fact that the burglars took home a small, empty safe.
"I hope they spend a lot of time drilling the safe open. They're going to find absolutely nothing in the safe, which is going to be great."