DeFede

MIAMI (CBS4) ― Last week, Marjorie Sheppard pulled her 2008 Mercedes into a service station at 54th Street and Biscayne Boulevard, placed her purse on the floor of her car, locked the doors and went inside the station to pay for gas. "I thought that since it was on Biscayne Boulevard everything would be alright," said the 57-year-old Sheppard.

Moments later, she heard the sound of breaking glass. A man had jumped out of a nearby car, smashed the passenger window of her car and stolen her purse.

"I started screaming," she said, shaken from the incident. "I was so upset."

Sheppard said she called 911 and gave them the license plate of the car and the direction it was heading, but the dispatcher told her there was nothing they could do until an officer arrived on the scene and took a report. She waited several minutes and again called 911. "I'm waiting for the police car that is not coming so quickly," Sheppard recalled.

When the officer finally arrived at Biscayne Gas, she said she told them they should be out looking for the man who smashed her window and stole her purse. But she claims, the officers said it was a routine matter and there wasn't much they could do.

"I can see a handprint on my car and I said to the officer, `Look, why don't you do something with his fingerprints,'" Sheppard said. "And the officer said, "No we can't do that, it's just a car burglary.'"

"There was no help from the police," she said. "I couldn't believe it."

The manager of Biscayne Gas supported Sheppard's version of events. He says such thefts are common at all of the gas stations in the area and the police do little more than fill out a report.

"They say the fingerprint guy is not coming because this is not a robbery," the manager, Moses, explained.

But not every case is handled so passively.

Less than 24 hours later, Noreen Timoney, wife of the Miami police chief, pulled into the Sunoco gas station just down the street from the one where Sheppard was robbed.

Timoney, driving a Lexus sedan, left her purse in the car and started pumping gas when another car – similar to the one involved in the Sheppard case – pulled up alongside her, and a man snuck up to her car, opened the unlocked door and stole her black Coach bag containing $750 in cash and an $800 Movado watch.

But while police in the Sheppard case simply took a report and moved on, the response for the police chief's wife was a little more intense. Within minutes, at least six patrol cars were on the scene, as well as detectives from the department's burglary unit and a crime scene technician to dust the car for fingerprints.

"It was serious," said Atiq Khawaja, owner of the Sunoco station. "A lot of police were here."

Surveillance video from the Sunoco was pulled and within 72 hours – based on fingerprint evidence taken from Timoney's car – a suspect was in custody. Alvens Loriston, 18, was charged with unoccupied burglary to a conveyance, a felony, for the break-in to Timoney's car. He has not been charged in the Sheppard case.

The disparate treatment between how the police handled the two identical incidents raises questions as to whether Timoney's wife received preferential treatment.

"Well I could very easily see how one could make that conclusion," said Delrish Moss, the Miami police spokesman. "Typically the officer that arrived on the first scene was right. Typically we wouldn't necessarily process a car [for fingerprints] that has been burglarized."

Moss argues the Noreen Timoney case was handled differently because the officers on the scene – recalling the Sheppard case from the day before – realized they had a pattern forming and needed to aggressively put a stop to it.

"Basically what you had is an officer on the second scene that went a step further," Moss said. "I think based on my conversations with the officer on that second scene; he was a very astute person who did the right thing. I can very easily understand and it is a reasonable conclusion to believe that because it is the police chief's wife that more may have happened. I can also understand that in the subconscious of one of those police officers there may have possibly been a thought in the back of his head, `You know what, let me go the extra step because of that.'"

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