Alain De La Bruere enjoys reviewing recordings from the security camera outside his Derby home along the Canadian border, watching deer and raccoons cross “without their passport.”
But on Oct. 17, he found a different scene: Three men driving a minivan across the borderline and through his yard on their way illegally from Canada.
“It was funny because the guys didn’t even know that there’s a camera on a tree right next to them, looking at them, from the Border Patrol,” the Derby electrician said Tuesday. “Their hearts must’ve been pumping.”
The haphazard crossing — first reported by WPTZ News — happened around 11:30 a.m. that Saturday, U.S. Customs and Border Protection spokesman Michael McCarthy said.
Border Patrol agents later found the Dodge minivan abandoned at the nearby Walmart, McCarthy said. The investigation is continuing.
De La Bruere said he’d left his home that morning to go shopping in Newport. When he returned, his Canadian neighbor told him he’d missed some excitement.
The Derby man pulled up the footage from his security camera and watched as three men hopped out of a gray minivan. The borderline that abuts De La Bruere’s property is marked with a row of granite blocks, which he said are pinned deep into the ground.
The men tried moving one of the blocks and failed, De La Bruere said, before getting back in their vehicle. Eventually, the trio found an untethered block near the treeline at the edge of the property and moved it.
Then, the Derby resident said, they drove across the border, through his yard and onto North Derby Road stateside.
De La Bruere said a similar incident happened last spring. He was eating breakfast when he noticed a few people trying to move one of the granite blocks. He said he told them in French that they couldn’t cross there.
“I was able to scare ‘em off,” he said.
When Border Patrol agents arrived to investigate the minivan crossing, they asked De La Bruere for a copy of his security recording. Their game camera, he said, records only a slideshow of still images.
Soon after, the agents found the van in the Walmart parking lot, McCarthy said.