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Between April 1 and June 30, law enforcement officers in Danville, Urbana and Champaign County took down reports of eight firearms said to be stolen — all but one from an unlocked vehicle or unsecured cabinet, closet or garage.
That makes 16 guns gone missing from across the area in the second quarter of 2024 — with another case involving multiple firearms still under investigation by a local agency and not yet available via open records request.
Here’s the latest installment of Editor Jeff D’Alessio‘s two-plus-year series looking into what police departments and sheriff’s offices were told every time a firearm was reported stolen across the area, according to officer notes obtained by The News-Gazette.
A resident of Urbana’s Ivanhoe Estates Mobile Home Park doesn’t think anything of it when her daughter has a friend and two boys over to “hang out and have a snack” around 5 p.m., just as she’s about to head to work.
Then, while in the kitchen two days later, she notices her SCCY CPX-2 9 mm pistol — with a bullet in the chamber and a full magazine inserted — missing from the cabinet above the sink where she keeps it and alerts the Champaign County Sheriff’s Office.
When reached by a deputy, the daughter says she’s already contacted one of the males, who “never mentioned a gun but did mention he would return something he referred to as ‘it.’” He texts that he’ll bring “it” back after someone identified as “Taz” wakes up.
When the male is a no-show, deputies head to his home, where he is reported as being “cooperative when asked questions about his involvement,” even consenting to a search of his residence. But he denies “ever being in a trailer” at Ivanhoe.
The male is “less cooperative” when asked about the real identity of “Sosa,” the only name anyone seems to know for the friend who was reported as being at the site of the gun gone missing.
At first, a Danville man tells police he “has no idea” who would have kicked in his living room door, broken a window and made off with two Samsung smart TVs, an Amazon Fire TV Stick and a Taurus G3C 9 mm pistol while he was at work for the day.
But one of the responding officers provides a clue that helps jog his memory two days later.
The footprint on the door appears to have come from a Nike Air Force 1 shoe, the same brand worn by someone he works alongside at Wing Stop. The man phones DPD and points the finger at his co-worker, who is interviewed by officers.
The co-worker “stated that he does have Air Force 1 shoes and added that so do thousands of other people,” the officer wrote in his report. “(He) advised that (the man) thinks he is the suspect due to not liking him prior to the burglary and just wants to blame him.”
For the record, the Air Force 1 is Nike’s best-selling shoe of all-time — “by far,” according to the manufacturer.
There’s family drama in Danville when a woman tells police that the two Taurus handguns she keeps in the glovebox of her 2016 Ford Fusion have gone missing — right after she let her sister borrow her car for the night.
When officers track down the sister, she’s upset that a) she wasn’t told there were guns in the car she was driving and b) she “felt that (the firearms’ owner) was accusing her now.”
The accused says she ran two errands — to chat with a friend at Family Dollar, where she never left the vehicle, and to collect mail at her former home, where she “was out of the vehicle for ‘maybe 5 minutes’” and had “shut the car off and locked it when she did this.”
Responding officers report no signs of damage to the vehicle that would indicate someone forced entry.
The first thing an Urbana woman notices missing from her shed-sized garage that doesn’t lock is the red and black lawnmower she’d picked up for $125 at a garage sale a year earlier and planned to spend the day pushing around her yard.
Also gone: the never-been-fired, still-in-its-box Taurus G2 9 mm pistol she’d purchased over a year ago at Rural King.
“She thinks it occurred within the last 3 days because that is the last time she opened the garage and both items were there at the time,” the responding officer wrote in his report.
With no fingerprints to lift from the scene, “I spoke with (her) about proper gun storage and provided her with a case number.”
From the Things That Make You Go Hmmm files: An Urbana woman reports her pink Charter Arms .38 special revolver — with the words “pink lady” inscribed in cursive on the barrel — stolen from the center console of her 2012 Chevy Suburban.
While she “did not notice anyone suspicious near the vehicle” when she parked it at Ambucs Park before heading to an outdoor barbecue, she tells responding police officers that “her driver’s door handle was broken, so she keeps her window down and door unlocked.”
She arrived around sundown and was gone for three-and-a-half hours.
A Deerfield man contacts Urbana police to report his Springfield Armory XDS .45 caliber pistol stolen from the glove compartment of his unlocked Nissan Rogue, parked eight days earlier in the east lot at OSF Heart of Mary Medical Center.
He was there to tend to his mom, who was “having health issues,” the responding officer wrote in his report. “(He) told me that he came to Urbana last minute and rushed to the hospital so he wasn’t sure if the firearm was in the car or not and he waited till he came back home to search for the firearm to report it stolen.”
All told, the man reports being away from his vehicle for around four hours — from 10 p.m. till 2 a.m.
Before heading out on a date around 9 p.m. on a Friday, an Urbana man tells a friend he’d been letting crash at his place: Don’t have any random people over and lock up if you leave.
When he returns home six hours later, both his PlayStation 5 and the recently purchased Glock 19 semiautomatic pistol he kept in a bedroom closet are nowhere to be found.
Neither the man nor the friend are able to tell police who’d been in the townhouse during the time the items went missing.
