Jobs’ house behind barricades. Photo: Eric Savitz for Forbes
FORTUNE — Beyond his name (Kariem McFarlin), age (35) and hometown (Alameda, Calif.) Santa Clara county officials aren’t saying much about the man they arrested for allegedly burglarizing Steve Jobs’ Palo Alto home last month.
But they do believe that he hit the house — currently under renovation and surrounded by a temporary construction barrier — by accident. “The best we can tell is it was totally random,” Deputy District Attorney Tom Flattery, a member of the high-technology crimes unit, told the San Jose Mercury News.
It’s not certain whether the computers and other personal items traced to McFarlin actually belonged to Apple’s (AAPL) co-founder. But if they did, you can bet they could have fetched a lot more in auction than the $60,000 value police assigned to them — and hell of a lot more than whatever McFarlin might have fenced them for.