Copper Pipe Stolen, Laptop Missing, Prescription Fraud

officers reported 65 alarms, 26 crashes and 10 arrests from Oct. 4-11. Following are highlights of the police reports:

Copper piping stolen from unoccupied homes

Three different cases of home invasion involving copper piping being taken from the basements of unoccupied homes were reported this week, according to West Bloomfield Police Lt. Tim Diamond.

Diamond said one case was reported Oct. 10 to have occured sometime between Oct. 8-10 at the 2300 block of Hiller Road in an unoccupied home that was purchased as a result of foreclosure.

One person or more broke the glass from the doorwall on the walkout basement to gain entry, Diamond said. Numerous pieces of copper piping were stolen from the basement ceiling, Diamond said, with an estimated value of about $1,500. Police detectives are investigating.

"We've had a rash of this," Diamond said. "There's so many unoccupied homes. How they determine how the homes are unoccupied, other than surveillance, I don't know."

Laptop missing from middle school

Police are working to help find a laptop that went missing from  on Sept. 16 sometime between 3-6 p.m, according to Diamond.

A student left her computer bag on the floor outside her locker at school on that day. A teacher picked it up and took it to the main office for safe keeping, Diamond said.

When the student returned to school Monday she realized the computer, a Hewlett-Packard brand laptop valued at $641, was missing, Diamond said. The student's mother reported the incident to police on Oct. 7 after the school exhaustively searched for the student's laptop, he said.

"(The school administration) asked its information technology guy there to go on the network and try to determine if the laptop is being used from inside that network, but they couldn't find anything," Diamond said.

Prescription fraud investigated

Police are investigating a report filed Oct. 5 involving a man who claims to be a 27-year-old Novi resident allegedly using a doctor on the 6900 block of Orchard Lake Road to write a false prescription for Vicodin, according to Diamond.

Diamond said that the man, who went to the doctor's office once in the past month, used two different forms of identification, including a U.S.  Uniformed Services ID card, and claimed to be a veteran of the Iraq War suffering pain from past injuries.

After billing the insurance carrier the man provided, the doctor realized the man might not have been who he claimed to be, Diamond said. Upon investigation, it was discovered that that man's identification had been used to file prescriptions for the same drug on multiple different occasions recently, he said.

Detectives will pursue and interview the man in Novi, but it may be difficult to identify the unknown suspect, Diamond said. "He'll never go back (to that doctor's office) again after the insurance company denied the claim," he said.

If you have any questions about this report, email Tim.Rath@patch.com.