Two Sets of Prowlers Flee When They Meet Up With Homeowners

In remarkably similar incidents – although clearly unrelated ones – on Wednesday and Thursday, Tosa residents ran into prowlers on their properties and sent them packing with a single look.

According to police reports:

A woman who lives in the 2400 block of North 72^nd Street reported Wednesday that two women had been prowling around her minivan and that they fled the moment she showed herself.

The woman said she was cutting vegetables in her kitchen at about 3:40 p.m. when she saw a silver minivan pull up across the street.

Two women got out, she said, and walked up to her van, which was parked at the curb. They looked inside, then went back to their vehicle and appeared to be talking to someone unseen.

The woman said she heard her baby girl crying upstairs and went up to get her. When she came back down with the infant, she said, they two women were back at her van and peering through the windows, one on each side.

The resident grabbed her cell phone and stepped outside. The moment they saw her, she said, the two ran back to their van and jumped in through the sliding side passenger door just as the driver started to pull rapidly away.

The homeowner said she heard one of the women shout something, possibly at her, as they drove away, but she couldn’t make out what she said.

She got the van’s license plate, which lists to a Dodge minivan belonging to an Ashland man, that was not listed as stolen.

The owner of the plates did live in Milwaukee, in the 2200 block of South 21^st Street, until as recently as his most recent arrest in 2009.

The homeowner described the two women as black and from 18 to 22 years old, but she could give no better details than that.

Just one look, that's all it took

A resident of the 9700 block of W. Palmetto Ave. called police at 7:32 a.m. Thursday to report that two prowlers had just fled from his property after they spotted him looking at them.

He said he had been in his basement when his dogs started barking, and when he came upstairs he saw two young men outside, one standing at his side door and the other at the corner of the house.

When they saw him looking out, he said, they ran to a sea foam green Dodge Stratus or Chrysler Sebring sedan parked in front of his house and took off. He could not get a license number.

After calling , he said, he had called his wife, who had gone to work about 20 minutes earlier, and she told him she had seen the same car driving slowly through the neighborhood when she left.

The man described the prowlers as black males in their late teens to early 20s, both with close-cropped hair and wearing white shirts.

Milwaukee police said they had taken a report of a green Dodge Stratus stolen from the 5000 block of North 90^th Street.