Four Teenagers Accused of Breaking Into Hemet Home, Stealing Guns

Four teenagers are suspected of breaking into a Hemet house and stealing several items-- including two firearms-- after going door to door looking for empty homes in a local neighborhood, police said Thursday.

Hemet Police Lietenant Eric Dickson tells Banning-Beaumont Patch that the four teens, ages 19,18, 17 and 13, had knocked on at least two people's doors who were home and made up an excuse for why they were in the neighborhood.

Dickson alleges that they then found a house on Purdue Court, near Florida and San Jacinto avenues, in which nobody was home, and broke in.

Police officers caught up with the group after getting a call of "four suspicious subjects walking around residential yards and looking at property" in the area, Dickson said.

When police got to the area-- the arriving officer spotted two boys jump a fence from inside a backyard onto Park Avenue.

"Officer Anderson contacted the two and located a firearm on one of them," Dickson said.  

With the first two boys in custody, two more were spotted by police.

"The officer could see two additional subjects walking briskly away," the lieutenant added.  "While walking away, the officer saw them discarding property they had on them." 

Those two boys started to run away as police tried to contact them, and it took about twenty minutes of chasing after them to catch them both, Dickson told Patch.  Both allegedly had stolen property on them.

"As officers arrived on scene, the two jumped a wall into a nearby housing tract and then started running through yards while tossing property," he said.

Dickson said all of the property found belonged to a resident of the house on Purdue Court.  

"All of the victim's property was recovered, to include two firearms," he said.

19-year-old Marshay Bradford was booked into the Banning jail on felony burglary and conspiracy charges, along with a misdemeanor charge of resisting arrest, according to jail records.  As of Thursday afternoon, he remained locked up.

18-year-old Demond Lewis was released Thursday on $35,000 bail from the Murrieta jail, facing two felony charges relating to burglary and conspiring to commit a felony, jail records indicated.

The other two juveniles were taken to Juvenile Hall, Dickson told Patch.

The police lieutenant urged residents to be sure to always report suspicious activity when spotted.

"Call us if somebody you don't know just shows up at your house looking around and seems suspicious," he said.  "The reality is if someone thinks something is suspicious, then it probably is; you know your neighborhood better than anybody else." 

The Hemet Police Department can be reached at 951-765-2400, or 911 in emergencies.