Every so often a police report really shows the MacGyver-like ingenuity of criminals.

Last month, on February 13th*, police were called to an apartment building in the 1400 block of N 130th Street after receiving a report of a burglary in progress.

According to the report, a tenant watched as a man pulled up to the building and tried to get in using the building's numeric keypad. The man apparently didn't have the correct code, and the tenant—who was suspicious of the man as there had been a burglary in the building's storage area earlier that week—struck up a conversation with the man.

The tenant pretended that he was locked out of the building but, the report says,  the man told him "he could get us in, that he had done it before, and not to tell anybody."

The man then asked the tenant if he had a removable antennae on his car. The tenant said no, so the man went and got a wrench out of his truck and popped off his antennae vehicle. The man then pulled out a roll of packing tape and "used the tape to apply a piece of thin cardboard to the end of his antenna."

The man then "went to the front doors..slipped the cardboard device between the crack in the front doors, and tripped the motion sensor inside the building near the front doors. The front doors then opened."

Once they were inside the building, the tenant ran to the manager's unit and called police.

Police arrived and arrested the man.

When police searched the man, they found a set of fire department-issued elevator override keys the man had used to get to the secure storage facility inside the building.

The man claimed he was renting a storage unit in the building, but police arrested him for commercial burglary and impounded his vehicle.

*Apologies for this very out-of-date AM Blotter. SPD hasn't released new reports in about a week, but I've been meaning to post about this forever so this seemed as good a time as any.