Heat-sensing cameras with night vision mounted on a helicopter first tipped off police to the thieves back in January.
"He's going around getting all the extra wire off the truck and sticking it over by that other truck," said Lt. Ryan Frashure of the Anne Arundel County Police Department as he displayed the aerial footage.
In the weeks that followed surveillance cameras at Rock Creek Line Construction, a BGE subcontractor based in Crofton, gave police a more detailed view of the suspects as they kept returning to the yard to load up a black, Isuzu pickup truck.
Ultimately, over the weekend, their luck ran out during a police stake out.
"They set up surveillance down at that location in Crofton and on March 19th in the early morning hours, they observed a theft in progress from the construction site involving these two individuals," said Frashure.
Detectives relayed the truck's description to uniformed officers who stopped it on Interstate 97.
In the back, they found a few thousand dollars’ worth of the construction company's wire in addition to a big reel of copper clearly marked as the property of the Anne Arundel County Police Department.
It's believed to be just a small sample of their take over the last 10 weeks or so.
"During this investigation, the construction company went back and did an inventory of all the items and all the property that was lost during the theft scheme and that price totaled over $100,000," said Frashure.
Kim Fahrenbach, 61, and Robert Prosser, 36, now face a series of charges including theft, burglary and trespassing after police went to exceptional lengths from the air and on the ground to stop a pair of suspects that couldn't resist returning for what they must have thought was easy money.
"It just shows how brazen they are and it's just very unfortunate, because these types of things have a ripple effect with the prices of copper and eventually prices that come back to the consumer," said Frashure.
At the time of his arrest this week, Prosser already had two outstanding warrants for previous thefts from that same location, but failed to appear in court earlier this month.
