MONROE, CT — A Bronx man was arrested on a Monroe police warrant Wednesday charging him with identity theft in the third-degree stemming from an incident reported on July 29, 2019.
Jonser Hernandez-Mota, 27, of 2205 Creston Ave., who was already in the custody of the Connecticut Department of Corrections on an unrelated case, was taken to court in Bridgeport, so Monroe police detectives could serve their arrest warrant.
On July 29, a 60-year-old Monroe man told police his bank informed him that a $48 check he wrote for trash removal had been stolen and altered. The amount was changed to $2,400 and the recipient to William Jenkins, according to the report.
Prior to the theft, the victim had placed the check in the Post Office drop box on Botsford Hill Road in Newtown.
Monroe police officers told detectives they were working on the midnight shift around that time period and had stopped a suspicious vehicle with three people from the Bronx, N.Y., inside. One occupant was Hernandez-Mota.
Outside the vehicle, officers observed what appeared to be something ripped up on the ground, police said, adding the officers identified each of the three men before letting them go on their way.
Detectives investigating the check fraud case later saw a surveillance video from an ATM in Boston, in which a dark skinned man with a dark bushy goatee, white T-shirt, orange shorts and white sneakers deposited the stolen check into the machine.
Police believed the image of the man in the video was a match with Hernandez-Mota’s face in an officer’s body cam video, taken during the previous traffic stop in Monroe, so detectives applied for the arrest warrant.
A clean getaway
A man stole a shopping cart full of soap from Walgreens, 275 Monroe Turnpike, then drove off in a burgundy colored Toyota Camry Wednesday morning.
The store manager told police a White male wearing a backwards baseball cap walked into Walgreens around 8:25 a.m., grabbed a shopping cart and went to the beauty products aisle.
Then the manager said she heard what sounded like a large amount of products being moved at once. She went to the aisle and saw the man shoving multiple boxes of bars of soap into the cart. She asked him if he needed help, but received no response, police said.
The manager walked back to the front of the store near the exit and as the man passed all points of sale, she asked him to stop and turn around. But police said he continued out the door with a cart full of soap.
Police said the Toyota, which had Kansas or Arkansas dealer plates, left heading south on Route 111, toward Trumbull. The incident is still under investigation.
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