HOUSTON — A Rice Village woman is the latest victim in a spree of home burglaries KHOU 11 News has been reporting since December.
Criminals posing as tree trimmers to lure their way into homes have cost Houston area homeowners hundreds of thousands of dollars.
These scams even made their way up to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, with one suspect possibly being linked to Houston.
"He said 'I need to get in the back can you unlock the gate in the back we need to get to that tree in your yard to get off our line,'" the victim said.
Outside her home are a lot of trees and power lines, so, she didn't think twice and met him out back.
"He's just asking stupid questions, I guess. I didn't think anything about it
," she said.
Just a few minutes later, another suspect came around the corner and in the side door.
A camera inside the home caught the suspect heading upstairs while the man who who knocked on the door and the victim walked back inside.
And less than 5 minutes later...
"I see this guy running down the stairs and I say 'Who's that?" the victim said.
She caught a glimpse as the second suspect walked down and out of the house. It didn't take long for the guy who'd kept her busy talking about trees to get out of there too.
"He said something like 'I got all the information I need,'" she said. "He left pretty quick. By the time it gets to my brain, they've already gone."
What happened still didn't connect until she got upstairs.
"I noticed my pearls were missing and opened my drawers and God, this was missing and that was missing and that's when it clicked," the victim said. "I was kind of p.o.'d."
Now, she's angry and hoping someone knows who these men are.
"Old people are kinda easy targets anyway," she told us. "You go and screw old ladies, that's just wrong. Get off your a-- and get a job."
The men in this most recent burglary don't appear to match the men who knocked on at least a dozen other doors since December. Houston police are now investigating this case, too.
"I feel sorry for them that they feel they have to do that. If they needed it that bad he could've just asked," the victim said.