A 35-year-old man appeared in court Wednesday on allegations that he pulled off more than 80 burglaries across the Twin Cities, targeting small and mostly independent coffee shops, restaurants and other retailers.
Deondre R. Cush, of St. Paul, remains jailed and charged in Ramsey County District Court with burglary in connection with the late-night break-ins that spanned from August 2018 until last October.
Cush has been getting in trouble with the law throughout his adult life, collecting convictions for burglary, theft, drug possession and aiding an offender in the 2008 murder in St. Paul of 20-year-old Antonio Sims.
According to charges regarding the burglary spree:
Cush started with four burglaries in a little more than four hours on Aug. 15, 2018, under cover of darkness. He smashed the glass front door of Café Cravings in White Bear Lake with a brick and stole $150. He used the same tactic to break into the Coffee Bené on Cleveland Avenue S. in St. Paul, the Finnish Bistro on Como Avenue in St. Paul and the Hampden Park Co-Op on Raymond Avenue, also in St. Paul.
Later the same month, he added two more restaurants in St. Paul and one each in Richfield and Bloomington to his list of break-ins and theft.
He often used his cellphone to search for coffee shops and Mexican restaurants that were near him over his more than yearlong spree, but also broke into a Halloween Express costume shop in Richfield and made one of his larger hauls at Capitol Guitars on Selby Avenue in St. Paul, where he came away with more than $2,000 and nine guitars.
He added pizza shops, Dairy Queens, a grocery and neighborhood bars to his string of crimes, often using a rock to bust out a door window or a pry bar to force his way in. He even branched out geographically, hitting businesses in Mankato and St. Peter.
