Thanks to helpful resident, car break-in on Fulton has happy ending for tourists

If you read the Police Blotters every week here on the blog, you know that car break-ins are one of the most common crimes in the Richmond District. This is especially true along Fulton Street where the bordering park on one side, and traffic noise make it easy for criminals to break a window, grab and dash at all hours of the day.

Late last month, outer Richmond District resident Kirill Semenov was jogging along Fulton Street when he saw two pieces of luggage with airline tags attached to them sitting on the sidewalk. Semenov was no stranger to seeing broken car windows on his regular jogging route, but he decided that instead of running past the luggage, which had likely been taken from a burglared car, he would do something about it.

He lugged the bags a dozen blocks to his home, then later returned to the site to pick up more of the victims’ discarded items. He then got on the phone with multiple governmental agencies in the Lake Geneva region of France hoping to find the victims. [SF Examiner]

Thanks to an ID left in one of the suitcases, Semenov was able to track down the owners – two French tourists who had been traveling for six months, and had stopped in the Richmond District to visit family. Late in the night of their visit, they returned to their car on Fulton Street at 1:30am, where they discovered shattered glass and three of their bags missing.

During their six months of travel, which included travel through South America, the incident on Fulton was their first bad one.

The French tourists had moved on to Monterey but came back up to the city quickly to retrieve their belongings from Semenov.

“The French visitors have made a friend for life in Semenov,” said a friend of the tourists that lives in the city.

Sarah B.

[via SF Examiner]