Man reunited with stolen dirt bike after DHS police sweep

Continuing coverage on yesterday’s Operation Sandstorm sweep in Desert Hot Springs. Law enforcement officers checked on parolees to make sure they were in compliance. Besides arrests, some items deemed lost or stolen, were found.

“I’ve been miserable since the 5th. My girlfriend doesn’t want to come over, my friends don’t want to talk to me — I’m just pretty pissed off,” said Thoron Brown, whose dirt bike was stolen in early January from the bed of his truck. “I came home from vacation, riding the bike, and parked the truck in the driveway. I was going to unload the bike in the morning. When I got up in the morning, it was stolen,” Brown said. Tuesday, more than 160 law enforcement personnel swarmed Desert Hot Springs in a parolee sweep. Their goal was to arrest those who violated their parole. “These are not people we are targeting for new offenses…We’re getting people who couldn’t adhere already to the terms of their punishment,” said Desert Hot Springs’ Detective Christopher Saucier. “I’ve never seen them come through like they did yesterday. They were hitting all the trouble spots in town,” said Brown. But what Brown didn’t expect was a visit from police at his own door. “He asked me if I had something missing, and I told him, ‘Yeah my motorcycle had been stolen on the fifth’. And he got on the radio and said, ‘Well, we’ve got your bike back,” explained Brown. The dirt bike thief was caught breaking into a home during the middle of the sweep. “Because this person did a burglary to begin with, with a lot of police officers in the city, we were able to apprehend him within a minute or two. He fled on foot and officers got him within a minute or so. He was arrested and that kind of snowballed into officers conducting an investigating and recovering the dirt bike,” said Detective Saucier. Police said people should be seeing more sweeps across the Valley. “I don’t think I’ve smiled that much since I was 5. Santa Claus apparently wears a badge,” said Brown.