LAKELAND, Fla. (WFLA) — Three Lakeland men were charged in a string of vehicle burglaries after one of them accidentally left his mark on one of the targets, according to the Polk County Sheriff’s Office.
Deputies said on Oct. 26, four cars were burglarized in the area of 2nd Street Northwest in Lakeland between 12:30 a.m. and 2 a.m.
During their investigation, deputies found a set of fingerprints on one of the vehicles, leading them to identify Brandon Lambert, 20, as one of their suspects.
The sheriff’s office said Lambert initially denied his involvement in the burglaries, but when a detective asked if they managed to get anything from the vehicles, he told them “it was an empty pockets kind of night.”
Deputies later identified the other two suspects as Landon Brown and Austin Stinson, both 18 years old. Brown was already in the Polk County Jail for an unrelated crime, according to the sheriff’s office.
Both Stinson and Brown confessed to their roles in the vehicle burglaries.
“This was some solid work by everyone involved who worked to solve these crimes,” Sheriff Grady Judd said. “It was a night of burglaries in which the crooks found nothing to steal, and now all they have to show for it are eight felonies each.”
Each of the suspects faces four counts of burglary of a conveyance and four counts of conspiracy to commit burglary.