VENTURA COUNTY — The city of Camarillo boasts wide thoroughfares and generally free-flowing traffic patterns with serious traffic jams unlikely even during morning or evening rush hours.
Traffic on the streets is truly sparse anytime around the midnight hour, which may explain how Camarillo patrol deputies summoned to a burglar alarm call at 1:00 a.m. on August 30th managed to arrive at the site of a shopping center pharmacy within minutes of being alerted about something amiss.
According to Ventura County Sheriff’s Department spokesman Sgt. Pete O’Sullivan, when deputies rolled up to the scene, they “observed the front window to the pharmacy at the location had been smashed” and noticed “what appeared to be a flashlight” beam bouncing around inside the darkened business.
One can only imagine the look on the face of 22-uear-old Corona resident Joseph Propernick standing there with “a crowbar in one hand an a cell phone with the flashlight app on” in the other when he glanced up and saw uniformed cops quizzically looking at him. After contact with Propernick, deputies discovered that the backpack he was wearing held “multiple pharmaceuticals that had been stolen from the business.”
Further investigation revealed additional property stolen from other nearby retail businesses, including jewelry which Propernick admitted stealing two days prior.
He was transported to Ventura County Jail where he was booked on four counts of commercial burglary and one count of attempted commercial burglary, with his bail set at $50,000.
