Woman Charged with Stealing Purse from Car at Buck Hill

A Mound woman has been charged with breaking into a car at the Buck Hill ski area in Burnsville and stealing a purse containing cash and gift cards.

Jennifer Elizabeth Martin, 36, faces three felony charges: receiving stolen property, credit-card fraud and identity theft, each of which carries a maximum penalty of five years in prison and a $10,000 fine.

Martin remains in the Dakota County Jail on an $80,000 bond. An omnibus hearing in her case is scheduled for Feb. 7 in Dakota County District Court in Hastings.

According to the criminal complaint, Burnsville police were called to Buck Hill on the evening of Jan. 13. A woman reported that someone had broken the window in her car and taken a Coach purse, a Coach wallet and other items.

The victim told police that her purse contained $200 in cash and a $200 Macy’s gift card. She said the purse and wallet were valued at more than $500.

The victim and her husband contacted police later in the day and said they had been canceling credit cards when they noticed unauthorized charges at various locations, including at Burnsville Center. The woman said they stopped at the mall on their way to the police station because one of the declined charges, for more than $600, was at the T-Mobile store there.

The clerk at the T-Mobile store provided a description of two women who tried to complete the transaction. While the victim’s husband was waiting, he spotted a woman outside the store who matched the description of one of the suspects, and noticed that she was carrying a purse that looked like his wife’s.

The man approached the suspect, identified as Martin, and asked to see her purse, telling her that his wife’s purse had been recently stolen. The second suspect left, telling the man that she’d be back, but she didn’t return, according to the complaint.

Martin told the victim’s husband that the purse belonged to her and that she’d owned it for more than four months. When he asked her about the Macy’s bag she was carrying, she told him she had bought items there for cash, the complaint says.

Mall security officers saw the conversation between the victim’s husband and Martin and stopped to question them, at which point Martin said her friend had thrown away his wife’s credit cards and other belongings in a garbage can in the mall’s food court.

The victim’s husband called police, and security officers held Martin until they arrived and arrested her.

Surveillance video at Macy’s showed Martin using the victim’s credit card to buy $245 worth of clothing.

Martin’s criminal history includes convictions for credit-card fraud in 2008, theft, check forgery and forgery in 2009 and credit-card fraud in 2011. She is on probation in Dakota County on some of those convictions.