by Jen Biundo

Hays County Sheriff’s officials have arrested a Buda man suspected of breaking into eight unlocked vehicles at four households on Darryl Drive in the Cimarron Park subdivision on Jan. 4.

While vehicle break-ins can be tough crimes to solve, investigators say they got a break when Jesse Howard Williams Jr., 40, was caught on a surveillance camera at a Buda business using a credit card stolen from one of the vehicles.

Thursday morning, just before 7 a.m., Hays County Deputy Mike Chance was at the Speedy Stop store at IH-35 and Overpass Road in Buda and saw a Williams drive up and enter the store. Recognizing him from the surveillance footage, the deputy approached him and found he was driving with an invalid driver’s license, investigators said. Chance arrested Williams on that charge, along with an existing class C misdemeanor warrant for issuance of a bad check.

Upon being questioned, Williams confessed to burglaries at three of the four households, investigators said. However, he says he is not responsible for the first theft, reported around 4:30 a.m., in which a laptop computer and IPod charger was stolen. The property taken from the other vehicles was less valuable, and included an IPod, wallet and loose change.

In addition to the bad check charges and Class A misdemeanor count of driving with an invalid license, Williams also was charged with three class A misdemeanor counts of burglary of a motor vehicle and one state jail felony count of credit card abuse.

The investigation is ongoing, and officials say they’ll try to determine if Williams was responsible for the first of the four break-ins, as well as a number of other unsolved vehicle burglaries that have plagued Buda in recent months.

“They’re going to look at several other burglaries and see if there’s a way to tie him in to those,” said Hays County sheriff’s spokesperson Leroy Opiela.

Deputies still have no leads in another string of vehicle break-ins at the Vantage Apartment complex in Buda on Jan. 9. Thieves smashed in the windows of four cars and took CDs, a checkbook, board games and a GPS unit, investigators said.