June 7, 2007

Police seek vandals who have damaged Leland students’ cars

Reward offered for information and arrest

By Julie Davis Berry
Executive Editor

Police are investigating the middle of the night vandalism of at least eight cars owned by Leland High School students over the last month.

The incidents started the night of the Junior Prom according to Leland on campus Police Officer Pat D’Arrigo and police are wondering if something transpired the night of the prom. “It’s a possibility, but the cars that were hit did not belong only to juniors. Some belonged to sophomores and seniors,” he said. However, most of the student victims were juniors and were a mix of boys and girls.

The cars have been hit by either a baseball bat or some other object and windows have been smashed, and in some incidences car bodies have been dented. All of the cars have belonged to students which were parked in front of their homes. Nothing inside the vehicles has been taken. The victims cannot be connected by school sports teams or even school cliques, according to parent Colleen Trotter.

In several instances a brown or tan colored Yukon or Suburban was seen leaving the scene driven by teenagers.
On Junior Prom weekend May 20th two cars on Martwood Way were struck between 12 and 12:30 a.m. and one on Mt. Carmel Drive at 12:25 a.m.

The vandals came back to Mt. Carmel Drive the following morning May 21 after 1:30 a.m. and struck another vehicle belonging to the same family. At 3:30 a.m. they moved on to Maiden Lane where another student’s car windows were smashed in from the back and drivers side. 

No cars were vandalized over Memorial Day weekend so perhaps the perpetrators were on vacation, surmises Trotter.

The vandals struck again around 3 a.m. on Saturday, June 2 on Pfeiffer Ranch Road damaging another students car in the same manor.

Police are investigating the middle of the night vandalism of at least eight cars owned by Leland High School students.

One father reports that his daughter received threatening phone calls in the middle of the night the night of the Junior Prom and is frustrated that police won’t trace the calls.

“I know they are overstaffed but what they are doing is reactive not proactive,” complained Behzad Salapour. “Does somebody have to get hurt before they’ll do something?”

Parents and police are wondering if the vandalism is related to egging incidents which happened around Easter.

The parent of one of the teenaged victims, Ricky Trotter, says he won’t give up until he finds who vandalized his son’s car. “His car is a ’64 Corvair so it was obviously hard to replace the windows. We had to go to a salvage yard to find them,” said parent Steve Trotter, who also happens to be an Almaden Valley realtor. “People work hard to be able to live in this community. It is a safe community but a couple of kids are jeopardizing our feelings of safety and it’s got to stop.”

There is a $250 reward donated by parents leading to the conviction of the suspect or suspects vandalizing these cars.  Call Leland’s on campus police line at 535-6290 ext. 209 to leave a tip. There is also a reward up to $1,000 offered by CrimeStoppers if an anonymous tip leads to a conviction in this case. Anonymous tips may be called in to CrimeStoppers at (408) 947-STOP.