An Oak Hill man received a five-month jail sentence last week for three counts of burglary. He is Carlos M. Martinez, 24, of 2249 Christy Place.
In a Feb. 7 affidavit for a warrant to search Martinez' townhouse for possible evidence, Fairfax County police Det. Stephen Sulzinski wrote that Martinez was a suspect in a rash of daytime burglaries in the Fair Oaks, Reston and McLean areas.
THE CRIMES occurred between July 2006 and February 2007 and, in each instance, duffel bags and other totes were stolen and used to haul away items such as leather jackets and loose change from piggy banks and jars.
On Feb. 2, Sulzinski began investigating a recent, morning burglary at a Herndon townhouse on Mager Drive. A duffel bag swiped from a closet was filled with jewelry, a leather jacket, two laptop computers and a large, plastic Coke bottle containing more than $1,000 in silver U.S. coins.
The detective learned that, on Jan. 31, someone deposited $1,097 in coins into the Coinstar machine at the Giant Foods store on Elden Street in Herndon. And a store employee saw a man emptying the coins into the machine "from a large, plastic Coke bottle."
Giant requires photo IDs for any cash pay outs of more than $1,000 and, when Martinez presented his valid El Salvadorian passport, he was given the cash. Sulzinski wrote that two Giant employees who saw Martinez' photo identified him as the person who'd made the large coin deposit on Jan. 31.
On Feb. 7, police charged Martinez with three counts of burglary, plus other charges which were later dropped. He pleaded guilty June 6 before Judge Terrence Ney in Fairfax County Circuit Court and returned last Friday, July 27, for sentencing.
At that time, Ney sentenced Martinez to five years in prison on each charge, suspending four years and seven months, and running all three sentences concurrently. That left Martinez with a total of five months to serve.