A second suspect in connection with an East Hills burglary attempt in December may still be at large, according to an investigator. A Nassau County Police Third Squad detective, James Wills, said the department is pursuing the possibility that a second man was involved in the crime, after last week’s arrest of a Huntington man, Rony Compere.
Some of the possessions left behind at the Wildwood Lane residence may not belong to Compere, and the man police engaged at the scene fit a different description, said the owner of the burglarized home, Adam Mehes.
The apprehended suspect was identified after a DNA analysis from a baseball cap matched a police profile, but a large shoe also left at the scene is unlikely to belong to the 5-foot-7 Compere, Mehes said. The suspect was originally reported in a police press release to be 6 feet 1 inch tall with a stocky build and curly hair.
On Dec. 5, the day of the incident, Mehes said, he was driving home with his wife and children when he received notifications from an alarm company. After several triggers from the alarm system, he said, he told the security representative to call the police.
“We parked outside the house and the police were already there,’’ he said. “They told us that they had found a man hiding in one of the upstairs bedrooms, behind the bed.”
The suspect resisted arrest and a struggle ensued in which he tried to take control of an officer’s service weapon, according to a press release from the police.
“When we got home you could see there was an altercation,” Mehes said.
Blinds were damaged, chips of paint were scuffed off the wall, and a child safety gate was broken, Mehes said. During a flight down the stairs, the suspect’s shoe came off when an officer grabbed his leg.
Mehes said he remembers the shoe to be either a size 12 or 13, after hearing the detail from police, and it was unlikely to belong to the suspect in custody.
When investigators booked Compere in connection with the incident, he was already in jail for an unrelated crime in East Meadow, according to the Nassau County Police.
Mehes said he was informed by investigators that Compere committed the later crime in East Meadow with another man who escaped capture, possibly the same six-foot suspect present at the residence in East Hills.
At the time of the discovery of Compere as a suspect, investigators only had DNA results for the baseball cap, Mehes said. While Detective Wills said he could not disclose details about the investigation, he said that all pieces of evidence left at the scene have now been analyzed for DNA. According to Mehes, the items include the shoe, a flashlight and a hair sample found at the site of the struggle. The results of the analyses were not made public.
