On June 24, the National Equipment Register (NER) received a call from a Long Beach, Calif., homeowner who witnessed the theft of a Bobcat skid-steer loader in front of her house the prior evening. That night, the homeowner noticed a suspicious white truck loitering in her neighborhood in the area of an ongoing gas line repair.
At 1:30 am the homeowner was awakened by the sound of an engine starting outside her home. When she looked outside, she saw a Bobcat S-250 being loaded onto the truck she and other residents had seen earlier.
The homeowner called the police immediately and the Long Beach Police Department promptly responded, catching the thieves in the act. In an attempt to flee the area, the suspects drove their truck into the patrol car and then set off to the 710 freeway where they drove on the wrong side of the road against oncoming traffic.
The pursuit ended shortly thereafter when pieces of stolen equipment fell off the truck and into the roadway. The suspects were arrested and all the equipment – including the Bobcat the homeowner called about – was recovered.
Because the machine had an NER warning/reward decal on it, the homeowner called to advise NER of her actions and as a result she later received a reward for contributing to the recovery of the NER registered machine. The skid-steer loader was owned by a national equipment rental chain whose entire fleet is registered with NER, and was out on rent when the theft occurred.
