By Ginger Adams Otis and Taylor Vecsey
The New York Post
NEW YORK — A young MacGyver with a larcenous streak is sitting in a Suffolk County jail as investigators probe the theft of dozens of ambulance and firetruck radios on Long Island.
Steven Riddle — an 18-year-old with a gift for rewiring gadgets and a serious radio fetish, according to locals — is charged in three of those cases, police said.
But he is suspected in some of at least 28 similar ones reported in the last year by volunteer Nassau and Suffolk first-responders.
The startling spree even raised Homeland Security alerts, sources said.
Cops found a “mountain” of two-way and portable radios in his Bohemia, LI, home, a source said.
The former Explorer cadet with the Bohemia volunteer fire department is known for constantly fiddling with radio settings, firehouse sirens and anything else he could get his hands on, sources said.
Arrested on Jan. 8, Riddle is being held in Riverhead County Jail in lieu of $45,000 cash bail, said a Suffolk DA spokesman.
He’s charged with stealing two radios from a Sayville Community ambulance on Dec. 27, two portable radios from a West Sayville fire chief’s vehicle between Dec. 24 and 26, and two portable radios from an East Moriches fire vehicle on New Year’s Day.
That same day, he allegedly broke a window in a Crown Victoria owned by the volunteer fire department, earning himself a criminal-mischief charge.
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