Brazen burglary of Fox News employee's New York City apartment caught on camera

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Raw video: Footage shows FOX employee's house being robbed

A FOX News employee recently had his home burglarized, the culprit was captured on surveillance video.

A brazen serial burglar in neon orange sneakers was caught on camera robbing a Fox News employee's New York City apartment on Thursday.

The masked man, dressed in a baseball cap, black shorts and a bright blue shirt reading "Superdry" across the front, broke into an apartment near the RFK bridge in Astoria, Queens, at 10:47 a.m., creeping through a room before spotting the camera and turning it away from him.

It was that misplaced camera that alerted the employee and his girlfriend that an intruder had been in their apartment.

"He left everything pretty much the way it was, except for the camera," he told Fox News. "If we didn't have a camera or anything, it would have taken us days to notice."

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The employee, who had just moved into the apartment in April with his girlfriend, said she had entered the apartment just moments before he got home from work around 6:50 p.m.

"I'm walking right into my building and my girlfriend calls me, and she's crying on the phone, and what she says exactly is, 'We got robbed,'" the employee said.

"When I got up there, she was standing at the doorway because she was petrified to walk in. She didn't know if he was still there or not and she found out that someone went in there because she looks at the camera. That's the first thing she looks at when she walks in. It has a little green dot on it and she saw the camera was moved."

"That was like full-blown panic," he said.

The couple quickly realized that heirloom jewelry, including a communion ring and a necklace, as well as other sentimental family tokens, had been stolen. Police valued the culprit's take at $13,000, the employee said.

"He went into the bathroom as well and put all the seats down and sat on it and went through drawers to look for opioids or prescription pills or anything else that was in there," he said. "We think he was definitely looking for drugs. In the second drawer that we have in the bathroom, that's where we keep Advil, allergy meds ... and all of that stuff was mixed around. The bottles were open. He was searching for prescription drugs."

He said the intruder got into the apartment "by busting the lock."

A Fox News employee's apartment was broken into Thursday as a burglar broke a lock to enter. 

"He had some sort of wedge which he inserted underneath the lock, bending the whole thing forward and jimmying the inside of the lock to get through the door," he said.

Surveillance footage within the building did not capture the man on video, the employee said. "I was the only one who had a video of this guy."

The NYPD said it was the same burglar who hit a cop's house in Astoria last year, identifiable by the exact outfit, which was caught on camera as well.

"I've never seen anyone wear bright orange shoes like that, so that's something that's gonna catch my eye the next time I see someone in bright orange shoes like that who matches the description," he said.

Police said they believed the same intruder also broke into a neighboring apartment on the same day.

"He must have hit my apartment first because then when he went right next door to us. [The family in the other apartment was] on vacation for a week and a half and he didn't open the door the way he opened my door," he added. "Theirs looked fine. We think he... used a credit card and unlocked the door because they didn't have the bolt on."

He said in the neighbor's apartment, the intruder stole jewelry and a safe with Social Security cards, passports, cash and diamonds inside. He said the neighbors did not have a camera in their apartment.

He told Fox News many valuable items in his own apartment remained untouched.

"The strange aspect was, he didn't take the three laptops that were in plain sight. My credit card was sitting on the couch, never took the credit card, never took a photo of it, it never moved. He didn't take a phone that was just sitting there. He didn't take anything that he couldn't put in his pockets. It was very odd because then he goes next door and takes a safe."

This was at least the third break-in in the building in the past year, but the building manager, Vito Giannola, told Fox News he has updated the camera systems since then, despite the fact that no camera throughout the building captured the intruder.

He also said the building would not allow him to install a new bolt lock on his door and he would like to see more security cameras throughout the building as well.

"The NYPD said it's like the most common lock in the city and it's like the easiest to jimmy," the employee said.

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He also said that since the incident, which left his girlfriend and him "traumatized," he has installed an in-home alarm system, but knows "it's hard to prevent these things" from happening.

"You have that sense that someone has invaded your space and just violated your stuff."