Updated 9/27/11
Dominic Harvey knew he was living life as a free man on borrowed time. Ever since he sold a stolen laptop computer to a Cicero electronics store for $150 on Aug. 22, he also knew he was a wanted man.
The reason? He had seen a partial picture of himself in news reports about a burglary in Riverside, where the computer had been stolen.
On Sept. 21, Riverside police arrested the 44-year-old Harvey as he walked out the door of his home in the 3600 block of Cuyler Avenue in Berwyn. He wasn’t surprised, said Riverside Police Chief Thomas Weitzel, and he offered no resistance.
Weitzel said police had Harvey’s name minutes after the first news reports surfaced about the burglary of a home in the 500 block of West Parkway Road. The burglary happened between Aug. 19 and 21, while the family was out of town.
“Literally within 15 minutes of the photo being published we had phone calls from several individuals who gave us all the same name,” said Weitzel, who added that others called with different names, which also had to be checked out.
On Aug. 25, an employee at the electronics store contacted the computer’s owner, whose information he found on the hard drive. The owner confirmed it had been stolen. He later found a single photo – a partial picture of a man’s face. A distinctive feature was a scar over his left eye.
“He knew it was on there,” Weitzel said of the photo. “He admitted taking the picture, but he couldn’t figure out how to get it off.”
Unable to erase the photo, Harvey reportedly took the Apple Macbook Pro computer to an electronics store in the 6100 block of Cermak Road in Cicero to see if they could tell him how to take the photo off. Harvey reportedly told the store’s owner he was going to give the computer to someone and wanted to clear the hard drive.
“When the store owner offered him $150 cash, he said, ‘I’ll take it,'” said Weitzel.
While the store owner couldn’t identify Harvey from the partial photo, police continued to try to apprehend him, going to the Berwyn address without success. Weitzel said that after Harvey found out police were looking for him, he moved around between residences in Stickney Township, Berwyn and Chicago.
Police also learned that Harvey was on parole at the time of the alleged burglary in Riverside. He was released from Logan Correctional Center in October 2010 after serving two years of a six-year sentence for residential burglary. Harvey has been in and out of state prison since 1991, convicted of offenses ranging from burglary to forgery, retail theft, possession of a stolen vehicle, obstructing justice and drug possession.
According to Weitzel, Harvey admitted burglarizing the Parkway Road home and a home in the 300 block of North Delaplaine Road in order to get money to support a heroin addiction.
On Sept. 21, police received information that Harvey might be working at a trucking company in Stickney Township. He wasn’t there, but the company gave police another address nearby, which police staked out. While there, police learned he was back in Berwyn at the Cuyler Avenue address. Around 3 p.m., Harvey walked outside of the home and was arrested.
He was charged with two separate counts of residential burglary. At a hearing on Sept. 22 at the Maybrook courthouse, Harvey’s bond was set at $150,000.
