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SANDY— Sandy police are working to identify owners of thousands of individual stolen items seized from a storage unit earlier in the month.
Officers believe many of the items were linked to up to 20 burglaries which had been reported since January, according to Sandy Police Sgt. Greg Moffitt.
The items were discovered in a storage unit at Public Storage, 9101 S. State.
Moffitt said that some items, however, have yet to be tied to burglaries at the facility. Once that happens, their owners can be identified.
"What we are dealing with right now is a large amount of property and trying to identify potential victims," Moffitt said. "We're trying to get it back to them, but we've got to be careful."
Police said the string of burglaries continued into early July, and detectives started to put together a pattern.
"Our property crimes detectives were looking at it and found that it was kind of odd that we had that many that were taking place there," Moffitt said.
He said investigators ultimately developed leads which pointed to a person of interest and a home away from the storage facility.
Officers conducted a search warrant on that residence, Moffitt said, and uncovered various items of stolen property and evidence that pointed back to a single storage unit at the facility that had seen the string of burglaries.
Officers reported finding the roughly 20-foot by 8-foot storage unit packed with stolen belongings.
"Thousands of individual articles, yeah," Moffitt said. "We actually went and rented a U-Haul to load all of the property out of there."
The case remained under investigation as of Tuesday and there have been no arrests or charges filed.
He said it was possible others might have been involved in the burglaries.
Moffitt said officers had reunited some owners with their property, but he said anyone who is missing property and was a victim of a burglary at the Sandy location of Public Storage should contact Sandy Police Department.
He said those individuals should be prepared to offer documentation of the stolen items including possible photographs and serial numbers of the items.
