A Staten Island homeowner raced home and brawled with a man who he caught on a doorbell camera while creeping around his home — leading to the suspected burglar’s arrest.
Christian Schlagler said he was on the way to Brooklyn to play pickleball when his motion alert went off and he saw live footage of a man in front of his house through a doorbell camera Saturday morning.
He quickly turned his car around and headed toward his home.
“It just felt like an invasion of privacy,” Schlagler, 26, told The Post about seeing the suspect lurking around his home.
As he drove back home, he called police and told authorities he believed someone was attempting to rob him.
By the time Schlagler returned home 10 minutes later, he said the unidentified man appeared to break in through a back door, swiping a bag of items that were in his laundry room.
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“It’s just something about seeing somebody on your property stealing your belonging that just made me want to address the incident and confront the guy,” Schlagler said.
The two men threw hands for a few minutes, with Schlagler recalling how he gained the “upper hand on him pretty quickly” before the suspect fled from the property.
He later chased the man a couple of blocks before police arrested the suspect, identified by police as 39-year-old Seth Flint.
The burglary and Schlagler’s encounter with the man were first reported on by the Staten Island Advance.
Flint was charged with burglary following his arrest, according to the NYPD.
“He did break into the wrong home,” Schlagler said, adding, “Hopefully he got the message what he did was wrong. Hopefully, he’ll learn from what he did.”
