How a Carroll Gardens Burglar Ruined One Bride's Wedding Day

Two weeks before the day she would marry her college sweetheart, 28-year-old Rachel Tepper was caught in a whirlwind of last-minute wedding chores.

It was 3 p.m. on the afternoon of Aug. 24, and Tepper — who works as the editor of Yahoo’s food section and has lived in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn, for about three years — still had a host of loose ends to tie up before her Sept. 6 ceremony in rural Maryland.

Centerpieces for the cocktail-hour tables. Signs for the dessert bar. Gluten-free dinner options for guests.

“Lots of little things,” she said. ”Everything, really.”

Tepper had just settled back into her Times Square desk chair after a final wedding dress fitting at Designer Loft in Midtown, she said, when she got a phone call from her neighbor, Samantha Babbitt.

Both Babbit and Tepper’s third-floor apartments, in the Brownstone they share on Third Street near Smith Street, had been broken into, her neighbor told her.

“I got the call when I was at work,“ Tepper remembered. “I grabbed my wedding shoes and all of my undergarments. The subway ride home was agonizing.”

Upon arriving home, Tepper’s worst fears were confirmed: The thief had found her jewelry boxes.

“I was like scream-crying, I was so upset,” she said.

Tepper estimates the boxes held around $20,000 in pieces jewelry — most of them heirloom pieces passed down by her mother and grandmothers.

“I’m the only girl on both sides of my family, so I get all the jewelry,” she said. ”We’re not rich people. It’s just from generations and generations.”

Among the missing items, she said, is a necklace from her paternal grandmother with a gold hummingbird pendant ”covered in diamonds and rubies.” Also in one of the boxes was a pair of diamond stud earrings — a long-ago gift from her father to her mother — that she planned to wear on her wedding day.

But perhaps her biggest loss, on a personal level, is a large black ring filled with diamonds that was passed down from her maternal grandmother, Edith Fox.

“My grandmother died a week before my seventh birthday,” Tepper said, holding back tears. ”I have a lot of things of hers, but this is the one thing I can remember her wearing. It’s so special to me.”

Tepper’s maternal grandparents used to run an odds-and-ends shop called Fox’s Trimmings in Sunnyside, Queens, she said. ”They were not wealthy people,” Tepper said. ”They didn’t have savings. But they bought jewelry so they could pass it on.”

On her big day, Tepper said, she wanted to “wear pieces of people who are no longer with us — to have a little piece of them at the wedding.”

“I feel like I’ve cried all of my tears,” she said. ”I‘m so upset about this.”

NYPD detectives in the 76th precinct (covering Carroll Gardens, Cobble Hill and Red Hook), said they couldn’t comment on the case. However, Sgt. Lee Jones, an NYPD press officer, said: ”A burglary report has been filed for jewelry and electronics valued over $29,000 being removed from the residence. The investigation is ongoing.”

Burglary reports in the 76th precinct have shot up nearly 80 percent in the first eight months of 2015 compared to the same time period in 2014, according to police records.

The records show that there have been 91 burglaries so far this year, as opposed to 51 last year.

“I love Carroll Gardens,” Tepper said. ”I had never wanted to leave. But this does challenge my preexisting notions about being safe here.”

In the days following the Aug. 24 break-in, Tepper said she had trouble sleeping, and was racked with nightmares. ”Every time I closed my eyes, I saw this masked person rifling through my things,” she said. Tepper and her fiancee, Jon Paley, a documentary filmmaker, also lost thousands of dollars in electronics to the burglar. They have since installed a new deadbolt and are looking into purchasing a more advanced security system.

“It was everything we own,” Tepper said.

Every day that passes without a break in the case, meanwhile, is another day closer to Tepper and Paley’s union.

“I’m really worried about not being fully present at my wedding,” Tepper said. ”It’s supposed to be the best day of my life, and I have this thing hanging over my head. It feels cruel and hurtful.”