A man woke up early Tuesday morning to find four suspects, including a minor, burglarizing his Del Mar house, according to San Diego Police.
At about 2:30 a.m., Kristian Armstrong said he and his family were asleep in the 2500 block of Lozana Road when a noise startled him awake.
He says the burglar got in through a window which they had left open because the weather was warm and everyone was home, including three adults and a child.
"I felt a light in my eye and I felt some rumbling in the house," Armstrong said.
When he walked out of his room, he found four suspects going through his things. He yelled, "What's going on here?"
The suspects, he said, started cursing and immediately ran out the wide-open front door and window.
But Armstrong was not going to let them go.
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"Got one of the guys," he said. "Got the driver, tried to pull him through the window. That's when the other guy came from the back of the car, came through the window, hit me."
Hoping to get some evidence, Armstrong, a former college football and professional rugby player, tried ripping off the car's side view mirror. But in the end, all he could get was their license plate number.
The suspects got away with mostly electronics, police say.
With the license plate information, officers were able to track one of the suspects — a 17-year-old — to a location on Mount Ada Street near Cannington Drive.
The minor was arrested on burglary-related charges, but the other three suspects are still at large.
SDPD detectives are investigating if the suspects are tied to a rash of burglaries in San Diego areas and the North County, stretching from Carmel Valley to Scripps Ranch.
Within two miles of Armstrong's home, there have been 73 burglaries since January, according to the city of San Diego's crime map.
While not surprised burglars chose his house, Armstrong was surprised about how brazen the invasion was.
"All the cars were here. They had to know people were here," he said. "Very brazen, or they think they're invincible because they've done it possibly a lot."
