While brazen copper wire thieves continued to target the Harbor Gateway community during the Thanksgiving holiday, their latest string of thefts were all caught on camera.
“Our community right now is just being ravaged by this group that’s stealing copper,”
The cameras captured the suspects using a grinder to cut several wires from poles, before putting the copper in a shopping cart and walking away. A neighbor said the grinder caused sparks to fly into the air during the late afternoon.
“They’re stealing copper out of anything and everything,”
David Matthews with the Harbor-Gateway Chamber of Commerce said the thieves have taken their thefts a step further, causing around $500,000 in damage to one building.
“They’re going in and cutting the power off the power poles and waiting for the backup alarms to go off,” he said. “They go in and they steal whatever they want to take. This building in particular was half a million dollars in damage.”