Bellevue Police arrested a trio of South King County men suspected in a rash of burglaries in the Somerset and Newport Shores neighborhoods. The suspects may also be connected to burglaries and the trafficking of stolen goods in Kent, Federal Way and Auburn.

Bellevue saw a spike in burglaries in April, with 39, compared to 21 in March. With the arrests of two Federal Way men and an Auburn man, there was a 50-percent drop in burglaries in Bellevue in May.

Property crimes detectives and patrol officers got help from the Bellevue Police’s Special Enforcement Team, which includes plain-clothes detectives and officers who focus on whatever the city’s biggest crime problem is at the time.

Following a confidential tip, SET followed a suspect on May 17 and saw him break into a home. Police arrested the 19-year-old Auburn man as he was walking out of the house. The suspect confessed to two other burglaries in the area and informed detectives of several other burglaries in the area committed by his friends.

“Our records indicate a monumental drop in burglaries since the arrest of this one burglar,” stated Lt. Dan Mathieu.

On May 24, police arrested one of the Auburn man’s friends, a 24-year-old Federal Way man, for trafficking stolen property. On May 27, police arrested a 19-year-old Federal Way man for residential burglaries in Newport Shores. He confessed to six burglaries, four of which were in Bellevue.

The Auburn man, Aleksandr Borodulin, was charged in court with four counts of residential burglary and two counts of trafficking stolen property. Sergey Vishnevskiy, the 24-year-old, was charged with two counts of residential burglary and one count of trafficking stolen property. The third man, Vitaliy Babets, was charged with five counts of residential burglary.

The investigation continues with other unsolved cases, and some recovered stolen property from the burglaries is being returned to the victims.