Police have arrested two suspects in connection with a break-in of a Secret Service vehicle in November 2023, the New York Post reported. At the time, the vehicle was parked in the Washington, D.C., neighborhood of President Joe Biden's granddaughter.
A Secret Service investigation led to the arrest of 19-year-old Robert Kemp and an unidentified 14-year-old male suspect. Kemp was taken custody on Feb. 7 and the juvenile was arrested last Friday.
Kemp allegedly got away with $1,000 in items, including night vision goggles, a police vest, chemical sticks, and a portable router. He and the underage suspect made off in a stolen Toyota Corolla.
The Secret Service said that Kemp has been charged with theft from an auto and unauthorized use of a vehicle. However, the Superior Court of the District of Columbia reported only the latter for the stolen getaway car.
The break-in happened on Nov. 12, 2023, in the upscale Georgetown neighborhood of the nation's capital. Secret Service was on assignment in the area to protect Naomi Biden when the alleged criminals committed the theft.
The vehicle, a black Ford Expedition, was one "used for members of the first family," according to the Secret Service. An agent was tipped off to the crime after seeing "a black male, legs hanging out of the broken driver side rear window" of the SUV.
After being discovered, Kemp took off into the Toyota Corolla in an attempt to flee the scene. The driver reversed the car, nearly hitting one of the Secret Service agents in the process.
The agent fired his weapon at the vehicle in return. Nobody was injured during the incident, and the suspects got away in the stolen car that was later recovered with evidence linking to the two suspects, including a McDonald's receipt with their fingerprints on it.
Authorities later learned that the juvenile suspect had been wearing a court-imposed GPS monitoring device and were able to trace his whereabouts that night to Naomi Biden's neighborhood. The teen has been charged with three counts of armed carjacking in a separate alleged crime.
Crime is a growing problem in the nation's capital because of officials' soft-on-crime stance. In this case, Kemp was released the day after his arrest even as D.C. experienced more than 6,000 car thefts and 900 carjackings in 2023.
This apparent misunderstanding of crime and criminals culminated in the appointment of convicted murderer Joel Castón to the Washington, D.C. commission on prison sentencing, Fox News reported. Castón spent 27 years in prison for killing a man in 1994 when he was just 18 years old.
He will be tasked with crafting new sentencing guidelines and reevaluating existing ones, all while holding the distinction of being the first convicted criminal to do so. The absurdity of this move did not escape Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR), who tweeted about it last month.
In the middle of a crime wave, Washington D.C. is appointing a *convicted murderer* to set sentencing policy.
How about appointing victims instead of a killer?
Another reason D.C. must never become a state.
— Tom Cotton (@TomCottonAR) January 9, 2024
Democrat-run cities are a smoldering mess because of poor leadership. When criminals are so emboldened that they'll steal law enforcement equipment from Secret Service vehicles, the problem is undeniably out of control.
