Theresa Antoinette Adams humped down the hallway of a Carroll County retirement center, bent over her metal cane, looking for things to steal.
Residents recall seeing a heavy-set middle-aged black woman matching Adams? description the night she allegedly walked in the front door of Carroll Lutheran Village in Westminster and purloined a stack of credit cards, a few hundred dollars in cash and about $6,000 in jewelry from unlocked apartments.
“It looks like me,” she told investigators when they showed her a photo from security footage.
But Adams, 48, of Richmond, Va., said she had burglarized so many retirement homes in Maryland, Pennsylvania and North Carolina during the past two years, “she could not remember all of them,” according to court papers recently filed in Carroll County.
She was arrested March 10 at Buckingham?s Choice, a retirement community in Frederick, after a resident recognized her from photos distributed by Westminster police and called security.
Adams was candid in interviews, telling investigators she targeted retirement homes because she felt like “she fit in with people and would not be noticed,” court papers show.
Adams told investigators she was terminally ill and desperate for money.
“I didn?t know what else to do,” she said.
Her methods were brazen for their simplicity: hobble into the apartment buildings through the front door, wait for residents to leave their apartments and burglarize the units with unlocked doors.
Adams preferred credit cards, which she would use to “purchase essentials for herself and other items, such as electronics and cameras, to sell to drug dealers,” she told police, according to court papers.
She consulted phone books and trolled the Internet for fresh locations. After each burglary, Adams would repair back to her house, on the 1400 block of Brownleaf Drive, in her silver 2005 Mitsubishi Lancer.
So far, Adams faces charges in Chambersburg, Pa., and Frederick and Carroll counties.
Carroll Deputy State?s Attorney David Daggett would not comment on the pending case.
CHARGES
In Carroll County, Theresa Antoinette Adams, 48, of Richmond, Va., is charged with seven counts of first-degree burglary, eight counts of theft of less than $500, one count of theft of $500-plus, one count of theft scheme less than $500, and one count of rogue and vagabond. She is being held at the Frederick County Detention Center on $225,000 bond.
