There was some very loud crashing and bashing very early Wednesday morning in one of Kelowna’s Upper Mission neighborhoods, as the Mounties descended in force to deal with reports of someone breaking in to a string of parked vehicles.

Alerted by one resident, police showed up in the Arborview Drive/Haskins Court area off Frost Road just after 2:30am, and tried to locate and corner the intruder.

But it took about an hour of chasing the man through back yards, involving more officers, a police dog and a couple of broken fences, before the suspect was finally brought to ground.

RCMP say a 37-year old Kelowna man who’s known to police will face a number of break-in charges. They also discovered a stolen car, and they wanted neighbors in that Arborview and Haskins area to closely check their parked vehicles in the light of day, and report any losses.

Kelowna Mounties are still trying to track down thieves who backed a truck into the front of a Dilworth Drive computer store early Tuesday morning, and made off with seven laptop computers.

But one of the employees at ‘National Computer Resource’ in Orchard Plaza says the bandits were pretty dumb about what they took and didn’t take–they apparently ignored computers of much higher value, and didn’t bother to grab any adapters or batteries for the laptops they did steal.

He doesn’t think they’ll have much luck selling or pawning their loot, because the stolen computers are more or less useless without those fairly expensive accessories.

Truck damage to the front of the store is going to add up to about 10-thousand dollars. The store’s video cams were operating but don’t record, so there’s no visual record of what the thieves, or their truck, look like.

A close call for an infant last summer has resulted in the child’s mother facing criminal proceedings.

22-year old Vanessa Baldrey of Kelowna is being tried on charges of abandoning a child, and failing to provide the necessities of life.

She’s alleged to have left her 4-month old child in the back seat of a locked and unventilated car, for about 30-minutes at a local mall parking lot, on a 30-degree day last July.

A passerby called 9-1-1, and RCMP broke a window to free the infant from the vehicle. The child was successfully treated in hospital, for elevated body temperature.

Baldrey’s court case has now been adjourned for a month.

West Kelowna Mounties are trying to track down the driver of a luxury S-U-V, in connection with a hit and run incident last (Monday) night on Westside Road.

They say a silver coloured S-U-V, possibly a Cadillac Escalade, may have hit a Corvette that was stopped on the side of Westside Road, sending it and its driver tumbling down the embankment.

The incident happened just before 10:30 pm near Pine Point Court, just north of Traders Cove. Police say the black Corvette was stopped, waiting for some sheep to cross the road, when the Escalade turned the corner and bunted the sports car over the side.

The 47-year old West Kelowna man was actually able to escape his Corvette, but also tumbled down the bank. He had to be ambulanced to KGH to be treated for torso injuries.

The driver of that silver S-U-V is asked to call West Kelowna RCMP at 250-768-2880.

Kelowna RCMP drug squad officers have been especially busy and productive over the past week, taking down 9-thousand pot plants at two major grow ops, along with marijuana oil, cash and weapons.

The latest big bust was a Saturday raid on an upscale home on Upper Mission Drive. 55-hundred plants in the basements of the house and the carraige house–three people face charges.

Maybe, it was last-minute shopping for Valentine’s, or maybe, just plain thievery.

RCMP say they’re investigating an early morning incident they say had somebody backing a truck into the front of a Kelowna computer store, then stealing seven laptop computers before driving away.

The 4:45am Tuesday robbery happened at a store in the 19-hundred block of Cooper Road. Damage to the store will be in the thousands of dollars, plus there’ll be the value of the missing laptops.

So far, no description is available of any suspects, or the truck.

The retired cel phone you give your child to use as a toy may be contributing to the ever-growing list of abandoned 9-11 calls.

That’s because–if the battery still works–that out-of-service phone is capable of making a 9-1-1 call, but the RCMP’s call centre can’t call back and trace it. In the interests of NOT wasting valuable police time, they’re urging you to remove the batteries from those old phones, first.

The Kelowna-based call centre, which serves the entire South East District of B-C, has been swamped lately with what they classify as ‘abandoned’ 9-1-1′s–mistaken calls that still have to be checked or chased, using up valuable RCMP time and resources.

Testimony could start as early as Wednesday, in the Cameron Capozzi murder trial.

The 52-year old is being tried on a second-degree murder charge, in the August 2009 death of his mother, Josephine ‘Babs’ Capozzi. She was found dead in the house they shared, on Young Road in the Mission.

A seven-man, five-woman jury was selected to hear the evidence last week. Some legal arguments on admissable evidence have yet to be made, before the first of an estimated 20 witnesses are heard from.

Quick work by Kelowna firefighters kept an underground parkade fire from spreading to any residential areas at an Enterprise Way condo complex.

The blaze got going just before 4pm Sunday at the Meadowbrook Estates complex on Enterprise near Spall, when a car in the garage suddenly burst into flames.

No one was hurt, including the woman who’d just tried to start her car when the flames erupted.

Residents of the 60-unit building were safely evacuated, but were allowed back once firefighters had cleared away the smoke.

A Kelowna man is facing charges after an assault incident yesterday afternoon, inside the emergency unit at KGH.

RCMP say the 21-year old man, who’d recently been a psych ward patient, went berserk and attacked two doctors and a nurse. Any injuries involved are believed to have been minor.

The suspect will appear in court later today. Despite a chronically overcrowded emergency ward, we’re told violent attacks on medical staff at the hospital are rare.