I Started Breaking Into Cars At 7 – Suspect

A 22-year-old man, Femi Godwin, has told police in Lagos that he started breaking into people’s cars and stealing at the age of seven. The suspect and his accomplice, Tayo Michael (29), told policemen attached to the Maroko Police Division that they had vandalised cars at Lekki area and its environs in the last five years.

The suspects reportedly vandalised a Sport Utility Vehicle, carted away phones and laptop on Aboyade Cole Street, Victoria Island, on April 20. Godwin and Michael were said to have gone back to the street the following day with the aim of stealing from another car. But unfortunately for them, their pictures had been captured by CCTV footage at a nearby supermarket.

Immediately the security guards at the supermarket saw the suspects, they apprehended them and handed them over to the police. Godwin, born by a Ghanaian father, said he was seven years’ old when his friend introduced him to the ‘business’.

The suspect disclosed that he had stolen different phones, laptops and I-pads from vehicles parked on the road. He said: “I started learning tilling from tender age because my parents could not send my siblings and I to school.

Some of my friends on our street then usually come to my workshop that I should leave what I was doing and join them to make money. That was how I joined them. “We always hang around Shoprite and wait for the occupants of vehicles to leave before we strike.

We would break into the vehicles and steal whatever the owner kept inside, especially money, phones and laptops.” Michael, an artisan, said he was introduced to the crime last December by a friend called Blessing, who, according to him, is now serving a jail term in Kirikiri Prison.

He said: “We don’t use gun. Whenever we see a vehicle parked by the roadside without anybody inside, we would move close to it and use stone to break the windscreen. We would then steal whatever we find inside. That was how I have been sustaining myself since December.

“I can’t remember the number of phones and laptops we have stolen from vehicles at Lekki and its environs. Immediately after the operation, we would rush to Obalende to sell the phone to someone in the area.” The state Police Public Relations Officer (PPRO), SP Dolapo Badmos, said the suspects had confessed to the crime. Badmos said they had destroyed several cars in the area in the past five years.