A pair of Cuban nationals were recently taken into custody by the Hopewell Township Police Department after the truck they were driving was identified as stolen, thanks to a new piece of law enforcement tech recently made available throughout the county., Ernesto Herrera-Lesteiro, 23, and Yonder Diaz-Sanchez, 27, were stopped in a 2014 Ford F-450 truck just before 2:30 a.m. on March 20 after Hopewell Officer George Peterson used an Automated License Plate Recognition (ALPR) system to identify the vehicle had been stolen., Officer Peterson had been on patrol along Route 31 near North Main Street in a marked patrol vehicle when the system alerted him to the fact that the truck in question had been reported stolen out of Houston on March 13., After conducting a motor vehicle stop, both Herrera-Lesteiro and Diaz-Sanchez were apprehended without incident., Police said a search of the truck yielded multiple credit cards that were not in either man’s name. With assistance from Detective Louis Vastola, officials learned that the cards were originally stolen during a robbery in Perryville, Maryland on March 17. Officials said Maryland State Police Trooper Christopher Wiley helped local law enforcement officers connect the two men to the kidnapping and armed robbery of a truck driver during that incident., The Maryland State Police subsequently obtained an extradition warrant and charged Herrera-Lesteiro and Diaz-Sanchez with kidnapping, carjacking, theft and assault with a knife., Peterson and Vastola charged the pair with receiving stolen property and possession of marijuana. Both men, who are Cuban nationals and list an address of Paterson, were lodged without bail in the Mercer County Correction Center., Law enforcement agencies throughout the nation are increasingly adopting ALPR technologies to enhance their enforcement and investigative capabilities, expand their collection of relevant data, and expedite the tedious and time consuming process of manually comparing vehicle license plates with lists of stolen, wanted and other vehicles of interest., ALPR systems function to automatically capture an image of the vehicle’s license plate, transform that image into alphanumeric characters, compare the plate number acquired to one or more databases of vehicles of interest to law enforcement and other agencies, and to alert the officer when a vehicle of interest has been observed. The automated capture, analysis, and comparison of vehicle license plates typically occurs within seconds, alerting the officer almost immediately when a wanted plate is observed., Utilization of the program in Mercer County began in the summer of 2016. The prosecutor’s office funded mounted camera systems for 25 vehicles throughout local and county police departments.
