7 arrested in suspected burglary ring targeting Asian households

This story has been updated to add comment from the Asian American Council of Oregon.

The arrests of seven men after a sweeping neighborhood search Thursday, Oct. 9, are linked to a wider investigation of home burglaries targeting residents of Asian descent, Eugene Police Chief Chris Skinner said Friday.

A search for the suspects prompted authorities to issue a shelter-in-place alert to residents of an area south of Franklin Boulevard, Skinner said, describing the arrests as capping a whirlwind 48 hours of investigation.

In a news conference Friday morning at police headquarters, Skinner said police were able to crack the case because of a few “grainy photos” from the scene of an Oct. 6 burglary in the Bethel neighborhood and the city’s much-debated license-plate reader cameras.

The images helped identify a vehicle linked to the suspects, Skinner said, each of whom were booked into Lane County Jail on suspicion of first-degree burglary and conspiracy to commit burglary.

They are: Robinson Camacho Rodriguez, 31; Denison Martinez, 24; William Steven Rodriguez, 26; Jesson Quintero, 27; Jhon Alexander Quintero, 44; Jhon Quintero, 24; and Steven Alexander Quirogasolano, 27.

Evidence so far links them to the Bethel neighborhood burglary, Skinner said, but he noted a recent recurrence of cases – four since August targeting Asian-American community members — similar to past burglaries that police have said date back to 2023.

“That’s part of the ongoing investigation, is we have to be able to connect those dots. But I’ll take this win for right now,” Skinner said.

For the wider investigation, saying “we have been on this path before,” Skinner noted past burglary arrests in Eugene. He said police believe there’s “a nationwide effort to victimize communities in a targeted approach” aimed at business owners holding valuables in their homes.

Given the targeted nature of the crimes, local Asian American community members have voiced criticism about a lack of police outreach and also concerns about the amount of police attention being paid to the burglaries.

The Asian American Council of Oregon previously announced an Oct. 23 public safety forum. Skinner, who mentioned some of the past criticism in his remarks Friday, said he will attend.

The council “welcomes any progress in the investigation of burglaries targeting members of our Asian American community,” the group said in a statement.

“We urge that these cases remain a priority so all residents can feel safe in their homes. We stand united in condemning any crimes that target individuals on the basis of race.”

Shelter-in-place alert

As of Friday morning, little is known about the men arrested. 

“I don’t know anything about the suspects other than names and dates of birth,” Skinner said, adding “it appears as if English is not their first language.”

Skinner said the suspects fled after police executed a search warrant in the 2400 block of Skyline Boulevard. They were found in a wide-ranging, K-9 assisted search Thursday night.

Police at about 9:40 p.m. Thursday issued a shelter-in-place emergency alert for residents south of Franklin Boulevard to Fairmount Boulevard, and from Walnut Street east to Augusta Street.

“That was issued as a result of those suspects fleeing the house, and we were in active pursuit in neighborhoods of our suspects,” Skinner said. “Anytime that happens, we want people to shelter in place.” He said police want to avoid an “unwitting homeowner” running into a police tactical team or K-9 search effort.

The dog-assisted search found one of the suspects in an “abandoned or empty” home. Skinner also said one of those arrested sustained minor injuries from a dog bite, while another was taken to a hospital briefly after experiencing an apparent seizure.

Skinner talked up the importance to the investigation of the city’s 57 license-plate reader cameras, which were first installed in May in a deal with technology company Flock Safety.

The future of the pole-mounted cameras in Eugene remains uncertain after a groundswell of community opposition to the technology.

On Friday, Skinner said, “The cameras in Eugene are what found our main suspect vehicle. That’s what started this off.”

The initial “grainy” images were not from police cameras. The “community’s ability to gather video surveillance helped us solve this crime,” Skinner said.

Skinner said police uploaded information from images taken near the scene of an Oct. 6 burglary in the Bethel neighborhood into the license-plate recognition camera system, also known as ALPR.

“We really didn’t know what we were looking for until we were able to leverage the ALPR technology,” Skinner said, describing a hit from the Flock system based on details like the make and color of the suspect vehicle.

“What we were able to do is put that into the ALPR, to give us an idea of when ALPR has seen vehicles that look like that car,” Skinner said. “And then it gave us a hit with a license plate attached to that car out of California, and then from there, we were able to verify that’s exactly the vehicle we were looking for.”

Skinner said the “hit” came while he spoke during a city council work session, at which councilors recommended a pause on use of the cameras pending further community discussion.

“Some of those people watching that were the entirety of my detective division watching what was going to happen with this technology,” Skinner said. When the system signaled a vehicle match, “if you could have been here to watch the number of staff that were running out of the building to try and chase down this really key investigative tip, you would have been impressed,” Skinner said.

Following the initial ‘hit’

The cameras are not in residential areas and the vehicle wasn’t tracked to the home in use by the suspects, Skinner said.

Instead, after the initial “hit,” investigators “constantly monitored the system to notice that it didn’t hit anywhere else in the city, which would lead you to believe that maybe a vehicle has stopped and parked somewhere.” This allowed police to concentrate a search for the suspect vehicle to a particular area of the city, he said.

The home searched by police was an Airbnb rental, Skinner said.

Skinner also said investigators were helped by ALPR surveillance technology outside of Eugene, allowing them to follow suspects to Salem. He added that “this group, we believe, committed a burglary in Salem while we were surveilling them” given the timing of a burglary report, though the surveillance was done at a distance so it wasn’t directly observed.

The arrests come after some 21 burglaries connected to an organized group or groups dating back to late 2023, Eugene police said earlier this week. Melinda McLaughlin, a police spokesperson, said most of the cases have involved homeowners of Asian descent. 

Back in June of last year, police made a half-dozen arrests in connection with a home burglary ring they said targeted wealthy people of Asian descent.

But Asian community groups criticized the department for delaying outreach as the cases continued to mount. In a January meeting, Skinner apologized to those in attendance.

“We should have done something there. There’s no question about that,” Skinner said in January.

Burglaries elsewhere in Oregon and in other states have also been said to target affluent households, often of Asian descent. Tigard police in February arrested four Colombian nationals suspected of involvement in more than three dozen burglaries across three states.

In Eugene, the burglaries have continued into this year, with one family speaking out about a delay in the police investigation. In a statement earlier this week, police said they erred in waiting several days to pass along case information to an investigator. 

On Friday, Skinner acknowledged the past criticism of the department.

“Even though many people have suggested that maybe we have not worked as hard on this as we should have, I can tell you that we have been tirelessly working on this,” Skinner said.

While the exact details of the burglary operation remain under investigation, “what I would say, though, is we believe that these are just the workers,” Skinner said.

“We believe that they’re provided with vehicles to do this work. They’re provided with some direction from somewhere to target these different individuals,” Skinner said. He said four vehicles were seized by police.

“This is a well-financed, well-organized, very sophisticated (group) tactically around how they conduct surveillance, use multiple cars, switch license plates, all of that stuff,” Skinner said.