Greg Stanton, master of the Meadows blog, alerts us to a new wrinkle in crime already in play at Altadena.  Our policy is never to cut and paste articles from other websites, but Greg graciously gave us permission to reprint his original article so that the word can get out as widely as possible:

From a Meadows neighbor:

“You may have noticed a proliferation of Junk Haul trucks parked around. There are several big, ratty looking wood plank sided trucks parked around. They are essentially the “Mother Ships” for smaller pickups that cruise the neighborhoods looking for about anything that can be hauled off, whether the owner wants it hauled off or not.

When they find a haul, they haul it off and unload it into the “Mother Ships.”

I’ve seen these “Mother Ships” on Altadena Drive just east of Lincoln and on Woodbury just west of Fair Oaks.  I’ve seen the smaller trucks cruising around as well.

I have already been victimized. They came up to my property and dug up around 25 feet of old 6” diameter pipes that were exposed when all the brush around them burned during the Station Fire.

When I drove up my driveway I must have surprised them because they ran from around the small hill at the top of my drive way with several pipes, jumped into their pickup and drove off.

Amazingly, I saw those same pipes in the “Mother Ship” on Woodbury later that day.

I notified the sheriff’s office and they came out and took a report.

Keep watch. If you see small pickups with junk in them cruising around, I recommend you notify the sheriff immediately. They will take any metal, junk or not, that they can remove. Beware!”