Wednesday, Jan. 19, 2005 | 9:33 a.m.
Employees of Oxbow Construction build homes, they generally don't investigate crimes and get into high-speed chases with weapon-toting perpetrators.
But they found themselves doing just that Monday afternoon when a group of men allegedly stole nearly $9,000 worth of copper electrical wire, swung bats at workers who confronted them, then fled to California with the Oxbow employees on their tails.
"Other than following them at 100 mph, I think what they did was commendable," Sgt. Al Cervantes of Metro Police's robbery section said. "The actual altercation could have been deadly if they had firearms."
The construction site of the Coronado Bay Apartments is at Jones Boulevard and Eldorado Lane near Interstate 215.
The Oxbow superintendent on the project, who declined to give his name, said he received a call from a construction superintendent at a different site late Monday morning warning him of some suspicious people in a red pickup truck and red Camaro who appeared to be casing the site.
About 15 minutes later, the superintendent and an employee, who would only provide his first name, Joe, spotted a group of men loading large spools of electrical wire into the bed of a red pickup, they said. A red Camaro was parked next to the truck.
The superintendent said he quickly told a forklift operator to block the cars, then he and an employee approached the men.
"I asked who they worked for, then they came at us with baseball bats and bolt cutters," Joe said.
The thieves were swinging at the workers' heads, he said, and the employees held up their hands to ward off the blows.
No one was seriously hurt, but the superintendent suffered a bruised thumb and Joe's cell phone was smashed.
"We were all very lucky," the superintendent said.
One of the attackers lifted up his shirt and showed the forklift operator a pistol in his waistband and threatened to kill him if he didn't move the forklift so they could escape, the superintendent said.
The forklift operator followed the attacker's orders. Then the attackers jumped into their vehicles and sped away with Joe and another worker in pursuit.
Joe called 911 and kept the operator on the phone as they followed the suspects onto I215 heading east and then onto Interstate 15 south toward California, reaching speeds of up to 100 mph.
"The intention was to follow them and communicate with Metro where they were, they weren't trying to apprehend them," the supervisor said.
A Metro helicopter caught up with the suspects' vehicles and directed Metro officers on the ground and California Highway Patrol troopers to the area.
"We tried to catch up with them before they got to California, but the closest units were closer to town," Cervantes said.
At the Nipton Road exit on I-15, just over the state line, CHP troopers pulled the suspects over and ordered them out of their vehicles at gunpoint.
They were taken into custody for possession of stolen property. Police found 181 rolls of electrical wire in the pickup, valued at $8,959, along with some tools. The property belongs to Challenge Electric, the electrical contractor for the construction project.
Police identified the suspects, all from California, as 22-year-old Fernando Vargas, 18-year-old Angel Astudillo, 27-year-old Etelberto Moreno-Augustiniano and 22-year-old Jaime Moreno-Augustiniano, 22.
Authorities are in the process of extraditing the suspects back to Nevada. Metro robbery detectives are submitting warrants charging the suspects with robbery, burglary, grand larceny and assault.
Construction theft is a major problem in the Las Vegas area, Cervantes said.
"The losses can be in the millions," he said.
The copper electrical wire, the property stolen Monday from the site, can be sold on the street, Cervantes said, or the wire can be sold as scrap metal.
Daniel Droll, who works for Interstate Plumbing at the site, said as he loaded up his pickup truck, that the copper wire sells for 24 cents a pound in Nevada but 95 cents a pound in California.
In 2003 Las Vegas was the fourth most active "hot spot" for construction equipment theft, according to the National Insurance Crime Bureau in a report released in November.
Metro even has a heavy equipment and construction theft detail -- two property crime detectives dedicated solely to the problem.
The department took 73 reports in 2003 of stolen heavy construction equipment such as backhoes, forklifts, tractors and tools, up 43 percent from 2002.
Only 6 percent of the construction equipment stolen in Nevada in 2003 was recovered, worse than the national average of 9 percent. The actual altercation could have been deadly if they had firearms.
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