Talk about a bad break.

A 30-year-old man from the Maple Valley area was arrested and booked on July 9 for attempted burglary after attempting to break-in to a police officer’s home.

According to Detective Jeff Johnson, with the Maple Valley Police Department, the owner of a residence on the 22800 block of Southeast 266th Street returned home at around 4 p.m. and saw an unknown bicycle in his driveway.

The homeowner, a police officer who’d just finished his shift, saw no initial signs of entry, but heard a splintering of wood from the backyard. The officer went to the backyard and saw the alleged suspect peeking his head through a broken door to a crawl space into the house.

The homeowner immediately drew his weapon and detained the suspect in handcuffs.

“You know its a bad day when you pick the wrong house to burglarize,” said Johnson, who declined to name the involved officer but stated he was a member of an agency outside of the King County Sheriff’s Office. “The guy is a uniformed police officer. It makes it a lot easier to do the case.”

Johnson said the suspect declined to give a statement at the scene, but he didn’t believe the man realized the home belonged to an officer.

“He had no clue,” Johnson said. “It’s just a target house… In this case, the house was up for sale so there was signs that the house was maybe not being occupied.”

There were no injuries reported from the incident and Johnson said the suspect did not put up a fight.

“The guy laid down,” Johnson said. “He saw the guy in uniform with a gun on him and he just laid there crying. It was quite comical for us.”

Johnson said the suspect is “known” in the department, but had never been caught for burglary. The bike in the front yard had been reported stolen a few nights earlier from a house about a half mile away. Attempted burglary is a class C felony.