Carol and Jeff Starr celebrated their daughter’s wedding last month with a bit of irony: neither was wearing their own wedding rings at the ceremony. Thieves had broken into their Southern California home last spring and cleaned out a safe full of jewelry.
“They hit the jackpot,” Carol Starr told CNN.
The couple had locked their own rings in a 6-foot-tall safe, where they also secured heirloom jewelry passed down from Carol’s late mother.
“My mother loved beautiful things and she wanted to leave a legacy through jewelry,” Carol Starr said. “She bought some beautiful antique jewelry, museum-quality jewelry.”
Orange County, California, prosecutors allege a group of thieves hid in the hillside adjoining the Starr’s home, watched them leave with visiting relatives, and made their move.
“They came over our fence, they broke through a window in the upper bedroom and came through that window,” Jeff Starr told CNN. “And then immediately started working … on the safe.”
The total loss: a staggering $8 million, the family estimates.
“You don’t feel safe in your own home anymore,” said Carol Starr, who is thankful no one returned home during the burglary. “I get so emotional and so mad when I think about what could have happened.”
Prosecutors say the break-in is part of a larger issue in which so-called “burglary tourists” enter the United States from countries that qualify for visa waivers, allowing a visit of up to 90 days without a traditional tourist visa. When the suspects arrive – most often from South America, prosecutors say – they join sophisticated burglary rings that prey on luxury homes.
In some cases, the suspects “lie in wait in these ghillie suits so they remain camouflaged,” said Orange County District Attorney Todd Spitzer. “They take advantage of the fact that most people don’t have window sensors or motion detectors on their second floors. They have WiFi jammers to stop the alarm company from being notified.”
Spitzer said the stolen goods are often sold quickly and the money is sent back to the suspect’s home country. Most often, that’s Chile, he said, which is now the only remaining South American country that qualifies for the Department of Homeland Security’s waiver program, known as the “Electronic System for Travel Authorization,” or ESTA.
The problem extends beyond California. Last month police in Scottsdale, Arizona, reported they arrested three Chilean nationals in connection with what authorities called a “burglary series” in the city.
Within the last year, police in Baltimore, Maryland; Raleigh, North Carolina; and Nassau County, New York, were among those announcing arrests in cases of luxury home burglaries linked to Chilean nationals in the US on visa waivers.
While there is no formal tally of the number of crimes committed by “burglary tourists,” the number appears to be, at minimum, in the hundreds. Ventura County, California, alone attributed 175 residential burglaries to “transnational theft groups” between 2019 and mid-2023.
“Not all Chileans are coming to the United States on this 90-days tourist program … not all of them are committing crimes,” Scottsdale Police Chief Jeff Walther noted in a March news conference. “I’m not saying that they are … But what we’re getting is hundreds, hundreds if not thousands coming in through the visa waiver program that are committing residential burglaries in dozens and dozens and dozens of cities and neighborhoods around the country. This is not a Scottsdale issue, this is not a Valley issue, this is not an Arizona issue. This is a national issue.”
Walther added: “We have to be willing to start asking some hard questions of our federal government about the visa waiver program.”
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