HOUSTON – A man was arrested and a woman is wanted after the couple allegedly broke windows and cut door locks to a vacant office building on Houston’s northwest side and stole copper wire estimated to be worth more than $300,000 from the building.
Justin Franklin and Christina Pivirotto have been charged with theft for the crime, allegedly committed on June 2.
Franklin was arrested and has since bonded out of jail. Pivirotto remains wanted.
Court documents allege the two stripped all the copper wiring from the 12,000 square foot, five-story building. They also allegedly stole two elevator control boards worth $23,000 a piece.
An employee of the property owner confronted the two and recorded video, which is alleged to show Franklin loading bags of copper wire into the back of red Toyota Rav4.
“That doesn’t look like your stuff, those are wires,” the woman can be heard saying in the video.
The woman continues telling the man, alleged to be Franklin, that the wires did not belong to him.
“This came out of my car,” the man said.
“I saw you walking out of the building sir,” the woman responded.
Pivirotto is also allegedly seen at one point in the video helping Franklin load the wire into the car.
“It looks pretty brazen. It’s extremely brazen, I mean, obviously this building faces the feeder road and so there’s a lot of people coming by. I think he tried to disguise it as if he was a contractor kind of coming to the building to do some work, but it’s very, very clear this was a lot of stuff that he took,” said Harris County Pct. 1 Constable Alan Rosen.
Rosen says this type of crime is extremely damaging to the businesses that get hit by it.
“It’s horrible. I’ve had several friends that are developers and that own centers where somebody has stolen the copper wire and it completely shuts down business. And then you’ve got to get permitting and you’ve got to get a bunch of things to rewire and you got to, it is a huge undertaking," he said.
Rosen also spoke about the woman recording the two and says while he appreciates the evidence against the two, what the woman did is not recommended.
“She really put herself in harm’s way. You know, when you’ve caught somebody red-handed stealing from the building and you see it and you witness it, those people, those criminals become desperate. And they could easily, could have been armed, could’ve had a knife, could just beat her up, could of stolen her phone that videotaped everything. It was a lot that could have happened," Rosen said.
In addition to the stolen wire and control boards, the building was estimated to have $12,000 in damages from broken windows, according to court documents.
Court documents also mention police were able to use the license plate number of the vehicle to determine the vehicle had been used to transport and sell scrap metal to salvage yards.
