It was a groundbreaking tactic.
A West Virginia man dug a tunnel to break into a pair of businesses over the weekend in what local police have dubbed “The Shawshank Burglary.”
Deputies from the Stafford County Sheriff’s Office responded to a business alarm that went off at Auto Chiefs in Fredericksburg around 10:40 a.m. on Sunday.
They discovered signs of a break-in at the used-car dealership and its next-door rival, Car Plug — as well as the alleged thief, who identified himself as Jerrylee Adams, the sheriff’s office said.
Adams, 35, told the officers that he was an employee at Auto Chiefs who was there to do drywall work and then planned on buying a vehicle next door. However, both businesses said they had no idea who he was and he was detained as police investigated further.
Police found that Adams tried to break into Auto Chiefs’ front door with a crowbar, but abandoned the attempt after he was unable to get inside.
He then got inside the building through a broken garage panel, then tunneled his way through the wall into the adjacent Carplug.
There he snatched keys to a vehicle, a company hat and a company pen he told deputies he planned to use to leave a note to business telling them he was just taking the vehicle on a “test drive.”
On his way to retrieve the car, deputies made contact with Adams and found the loot on his person, cops said.
“Unlike Andy Dunfresne, Adam[s] would not be able to escape this,” the sheriff’s office said, referring to Tim Robbins’ character that escaped prison via a tunnel dug over 20 years in the 1994 drama, “The Shawshank Redemption.”
Adams was charged with two counts of statutory burglary, attempted grand larceny, larceny, possession of burglary tools and two counts of destruction of property.
He is being held in the Rappahannock Regional Jail without bond following a “contentious” hearing, police said.
The strange tunnel burglary comes as NYPD clashed with angry Orthodox Jewish students from the Chabad-Lubavitch sect in Brooklyn as officials worked to close a 50-foot-long tunnel.
The young rebels had been working on the tunnel for years underneath the sect’s historic world headquarters in Crown Heights to force the establishment into growing the neighboring abandoned space the tunnel led to.