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Crime & Safety

Fingerprints Lead To Man's Arrest For School Burglary Two Years Ago

Also arrested in April for allegedly burglarizing the same school.

A Wilton man's arrest in April for allegedly burglarizing a Norwalk elementary school led to his arrest by warrant on Monday for a burglary at the same school two years earlier.

The warrant charges Anthony Andre Hines with criminal attempt at third-degree burglary and loitering on or about school grounds.

On February 2, 2010, a custodian at Tracey Elementary School, 20 Camp St., noticed an attempt was made to pull back six or seven window screens, leaving them damaged.

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Police spokeswoman Sgt. Lisa Cotto said on Tuesday the school had had a computer stolen in a burglary several weeks earlier, so detectives examined the damaged screens and obtained latent fingerprints from them. The detectives entered the prints into a national fingerprint database known as the Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System (IAFIS) and found it contained no matching prints.

On April 21 of this year, a passerby called police at 9:45 p.m. to report there was a broken window at Tracey School and a male wearing jeans and a backpack was walking away from the school. An officer spotted a man, later identified as Hines, matching the description on Belden Avenue, and stopped him. The officer reported that when he searched Hines' backpack, he found it contained two Dell laptop computers labeled "Property of Norwalk Schools" and "Lab 15," with "15" being the room number at Tracey School where the laptops were kept.

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Hines, 20, of 369 Mountain Rd., was taken into custody at that time and charged with third-degree burglary and fourth-degree larceny. His case on those charges is pending, with his next court appearance scheduled  for Thursday.

In the course of being processed for his warrant arrest on Monday, police ran Hines' fingerprints through IAFIS and found they matched the prints detectives collected at the school in 2010.

Hines was held on $10,000 bond and given a court date of June 11.

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