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“Just Looking For My Cat” Burglars Arrested At South Seattle Tire Shop

Even dog-lovers know these three basic facts about cats: they love batting around yarn, can’t get enough gentle rubbies behind their ears, and boy do they ever love hiding out in piles of tires in the middle of the night.

So, naturally, if your cat ever goes missing, what do you? You go down to the yard of a tire shop after dark, crawl through a hole in the fence and check under all the tires and rims–maybe even load a couple into your truck–in the hopes of finding Mr. Mittens.

That’s more or less what one man told police after he was caught roaming around the inside a South Park tire business early this morning.

Around 1:30 AM, officers were dispatched to the tire shop in the 9000 block of 14th Avenue South to investigate a break-in.

As officers pulled up to the scene, they saw a 26-year-old man in a grey hooded sweatshirt looking through tire rims inside the business’s fence, and a 29-year-old man skulking around a white Ford pickup truck parked nearby.

Officers also noticed a hole cut in the tire shop’s fence, and a collection of five wheels, worth about $2,000, stacked in and around the bed of the pickup.

When Officers Bryan Grozav and Hosea Crumpton contacted the men, the 26-year-old claimed he had crawled through the business’s fence while “looking for his cat.” He added that the hole in the fence was totally like that when he got there. The 29-year-old also provided very little in the way of an explanation. While officers had seen him walking around the scene, he claimed he’d been asleep in the pickup and had just gotten out of jail.

Officers booked both of them into the King County Jail for burglary. Police were unable to locate any stray cats in the vicinity of the business.