Comic book store staffers track down suspect in rash of Bay Area burglaries

    California (KPIX) -- A brazen thief who didn't try very hard to cover his tracks was apprehended by authorities with help from a rag-tag group of amateur detectives. It sounds like the plot to a new comic book series, but this is the true story of a pair of Castro Valley comic book store staff members turned sleuths.

Crush Comics owner Josh Hunter and store manager Cole Sanders never thought they'd find themselves as real-life comic book vigilantes, but that's exactly what happened after the shop was burglarized in the early morning hours of March 22.

"When I got down here, I was like, 'OK, it's not as bad as it could be. I'm going to try to be really positive about this,'" said Hunter.

The burglar cleared the wall where the most valuable comic books were displayed. Hunter thought they were all gone for good, until one of his employees spotted a very specific comic book for sale on eBay less than 12 hours after the burglary.

"This is the one that really solved the case. The absolutely unique one-of-one sketch cover from our artist friend Dan. When I saw that on eBay I was like, 'I'm just going to buy that and see what happens.' And we got the guy's name and address and everything, and there it was," said Hunter.

From there, Hunter went to an Instagram page for someone with the same name and found a telling post. In it was a Lego bandit figurine offering to buy, sell or trade Lego sets in the East Bay. He also saw other photos which looked very similar to the mystery man in the hoodie on the shop surveillance video.

The honorary detectives didn't stop there and contacted a competing shop in San Leandro that had also been broken into recently.

"I called them and I was like, 'Hey, we found this eBay page. They look almost certainly like they stole some of our stuff. You should check too.' And they got back to us and they're like, 'Yes. There's like ten of our books on there right now.' And I was like, 'Wow! OK,'" said Hunter.

When they saw Lego items on the eBay page, they reached out to a toy shop in San Ramon that had recently lost a number of valuable sets to a shoplifter.

"She's like, 'Do you think this is him?' And she showed a picture of the guy that they had, and he wasn't masked in this one. And based on the Google searches and stuff that we did, we were like, 'This is probably the guy,'" said Hunter.

They turned the information over to police. Just a couple of days later, another toy shop was hit.

"My wife and I are looking at each other and [thinking the] same thing. They broke the window, they got in, they stole a whole bunch of stuff and left. Do you think this could be the same guy? So I go to message them on Instagram. We had already had a message from them saying, 'Hey, we think it's the same guy,'" said Hunter.

The very next day the Alameda County Sheriff's Department served a search warrant at the home of 29-year-old Noorullah Amiri of Livermore where they said they found tens of thousands of dollars of comic books, collectables and Lego sets — the majority of which were returned to their respective stores.

"Everybody is really appreciative and everybody's really cool. We now have a little text group chain of shop owners talking about it," said Hunter. Reflecting on the entire experience, the Castro Valley Avengers could only do one thing, quote another comic book super-hero.

"What did Peacemaker say? 'Who knows why crazy men do the things that they do?' Yeah," they said laughing.

They said they're now actually thinking about publishing their own comic book collection based on the break-in and subsequent detective work, but they said they'd have to change it up a bit and make the villain a little harder to catch.