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The Epley car, stolen from the driveway on November 21.
A quartet of car thieves from New Jersey visited Southampton on Sunday morning, leaving in their wake stolen cars, busy police and a feeling of disquiet in the victims.
Southampton Village Police Detective Sergeant Herman Lamison pieced together the sequence of events.
On the morning of November 21, a group of thieves drove to Southampton in a Nissan Rogue that had been stolen in New Jersey. Their first stop was Gas Hampton on County Road 39, where sometime between 6:48 and 7:10 a.m. they filled up the car and drove off without paying.
Next stop was North Sea-Mecox Road, where they took a black Range Rover from a location in the Southampton Town Police Department’s jurisdiction. Town Police didn’t immediately provide details of that theft.
Just after 8 a.m., Brittany Epley saw someone wearing a black ski mask back husband Zach’s gray 2019 BMW X7 out of their West Prospect Street driveway in the village. She also observed several others waiting in front of her house in a black Range Rover.
“My wife ran out and was banging on the window as the guy in a ski mask with flames on it was trying to start it,” Zach Epley said on Monday. “Then my wallet was in the car, and they tried to use my credit cards to buy shoes at Jimmy Jazz at the Gardens Mall in New Jersey.”
Minutes later, police received a report from a North Sea Road gas station that a black Range Rover with three or four suspects inside asked an attendant to pump their gas. As soon as he was finished, with a bill topping $92, the SUV sped off.
Meanwhile, one of the group ditched the Nissan on the side of the road in Water Mill. Town Police reported finding an abandoned car on Montauk Highway
Zach Epley’s BMW was found “totaled” in New Jersey near the Holland Tunnel, said Mark Epley, Zach’s father and a former Southampton Village mayor.
Both sets of keys for the vehicle were inside the house at the time of the theft. According to Mark Epley, his daughter-in-law believes the thieves may have cloned the car’s key fobs during an earlier visit when they came to front door posing as people trying to sell candy for donations.
The Hamptons has become the destination for car thieves recently, but the owners of most of the stolen luxury rides left their cars unlocked with the keys inside the vehicle. The cloning of a key fob from outside a house is new.
Lamison, who is part of the regional auto crime task force, said police are just learning about the ability of criminals to clone key fobs. “We’re getting more information about that, and the technology of the cars,” he said, agreeing, “It’s scary.”
