Surfing and surfboards probably wouldn’t be images one associates with LAPD’s Hollenbeck Area and yet a missing surfboard was precisely the subject of a recent investigation.
In Hollenbeck Area on August 9, 2015, a woman placed a surfboard on top of her vehicle but forgot to tie it down. As she drove away, it fell to the ground; so when she realized what happened, she returned to the area but was unable to locate it. She was especially upset, as this was no ordinary surfboard. It was fabricated in Japan and inscribed with her name and the maker’s autograph.
Worried she would never see her surfboard again, the victim and her friends scoured Craigslist hoping it would turn up for sale, and the hunch paid off. So she immediately contacted Officer Christopher Rodriguez at the Hollenbeck Area desk, and Detectives Ron Chavarria and Omar Franco completed a work-up of the seller and responded to his location. They explained to the victim there was no guarantee of recovering the surfboard from the (Craigslist) seller. In fact, he could pretty much tell them to get lost.
But fate was smiling on the woman and her missing surfboard. When detectives met with the seller and told him the surfboard shouldn’t have been for sale, the seller revealed he had purchased it at a community yard sale. Fortunately, he was very cooperative and quickly handed it over so detectives could return it to its rightful owner.
“This was actually a kind gesture by my unit,” said Sergeant Stanley Young, the officer in charge of burglary and theft coordination at Hollenbeck, “a pure case of reaching out to the community and assisting a person who was pretty upset that this all occurred.”
Accompanying photo shows Detectives Franco (left) and Chavarria with the missing surfboard they recovered.
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