47°
A judge earlier this month freed Shawn Todd, 47, less than 48 hours after he was arrested following back-to-back burglaries at an auto repair shop in Rochelle Park and a gas station in Maywood.
Three weeks earlier, Maywood police responding to a call of a suspicious person on a bicycle said they found him carrying a power drill and copper piping taken from a house under construction.
On Sunday morning, authorities said, he pulled a knife on a clerk at the 7-Eleven on State Street.
The clerk refused to give him any money -- so he took the barcode scanner, they said.
Surveillance video helped detectives identify Todd, whose criminal record stretches back more than 20 years.
Altogether, Todd has been arrested and charged by police in no fewer than five different towns in Bergen County over the past nine months.
He also was arrested in South Hackensack last winter after authorities said he assaulted an emergency medical technician.
Each time a judge has released him under New Jersey's 2017 Bail Reform & Speedy Trial Act.
Daily Voice has reported several incidents involving such defendants since judges in New Jersey began using a "risk assessment tool" to determine whether defendants go free or remain jailed without bail based on the possibility that they:
- will skip court;
- pose a danger to the community;
- try to intimate witnesses or victims.
Other considerations include how old the offender is, whether the crime was violent, past convictions and other pending charges.
"High-risk" offenders are detained. The rest are released with conditions or supervision that police say many have ignored.
Police arrested Todd on Monday at a Park Street boarding house where he's been living. He remained held in the Bergen County Jail pending a detention hearing on robbery charges.
Also in the county lockup was his brother, 43-year-old Mark Todd, another career criminal with a rap sheet dating back to 1994.
Mark Todd faces dozens of charges -- most of them burglary and theft -- out of New Milford, Teaneck, Rochelle Park and elsewhere in just the past year.
He's been held in the jail since New Milford police -- assisted by their colleagues from Bergen County Prosecutor's Office and police from Hackensack, Teaneck, Paramus and Rochelle Park -- arrested him on burglary charges in August.
Click here to follow Daily Voice Hackensack and receive free news updates.
