A 46-year-old man unlucky enough to pick a storage building to rob located just across the street from the owner’s home pled guilty to a theft of property charge during a recent session of Baxter County Circuit Court.
Forty-six-year-old Blaine Douglas Stern was sentenced to four years probation. He was also ordered to pay $2,000 in victim restitution
The robbery took place in mid-April last year and was reported by the owner.
She told the Baxter County Sheriffs office she had seen a black SUV backed up to the doorway of her storage building located near the intersection of U.S. Highway 62 and County Road 5.
She said a man was removing items and putting them in the SUV.
The owner said she drove across the street and attempted to block the SUV to prevent the robber from leaving the scene.
According to the probable cause affidavit, the male, later identified as Stern, drove around the owner and sped away.
The victim said some of the items that had been put in the SUV fell out of the defective rear hatch of the vehicle as Stern was fleeing.
An investigator with the sheriff’s office checked the Leads-On-Line system and found that Stern had sold some items at a Mountain Home scrapyard less than two hours following the robbery.
The Leads-On-Line system provides information on sales made to businesses such as scrap metal dealers, pawnshops, gold buyers and secondhand dealers. The businesses are typically required by law to report transactions and to share that information with law enforcement.
A photograph of the vehicle in which the items were transported to the scrapyard was taken by the business.
It showed a black SUV with a defective rear hatch, the same type of vehicle identified by the owner of the storage building.
One of the items that had been sold to the scrapyard was a large, commercial stand mixer. The victim identified it as one of the items taken from her storage building.
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