Empty Safe Is a Real Drag for Thieves : Crime: A midnight getaway in Canoga Park is marked by a deafening rumble and a trail of sparks.

Police said the first mistake the thieves made was stealing a 6,000-pound safe that looked impressive enough to safeguard a fortune but, alas, was empty.

The second mistake was that the midnight getaway involved dragging the safe behind a car, which created a shower of sparks that could be seen for blocks and a deafening rumbling that rudely awakened a Canoga Park neighborhood.

Those mistakes landed James Richardson, 32, and Jeffrey Defalco, 18, both of Canoga Park, in jail Friday morning on suspicion of grand theft after two paramedics saw the safe heist in progress, Los Angeles police said.

“It looked liked they were towing a Roman candle,” paramedic Dave Stamp said.

Police said the suspects didn’t know that the locked magnesium steel safe was empty. The suspects allegedly tied a nylon strap around the 82-year-old safe and dragged it on its side away from the front of a lock and safe shop about 12:30 a.m.

It wasn’t a stealthy caper.

“I heard a big thundering noise,” said ViVi Schatkowski, who lives in the 22800 block of Blythe Street. She awoke when the safe was dragged by her house. “When I looked out my window, I saw the car coming down the street with sparks flying all over the place. The ground was shaking.”

Stamp and his partner, Paul Clark, who had seen the getaway attempt on Roscoe Boulevard, followed from a discreet distance in their ambulance while transmitting their location to police.

“It was real unusual,” Stamp said. “At first we weren’t sure what it was. We thought it was like a washer or dryer. We couldn’t tell, there were so many sparks.”

By the time officers arrived, the two men had stopped their El Camino near Strathern Street and Fairchild Avenue and apparently were preparing to open the safe using tools, Detective Frank Bachman said.

The two suspects told officers they had stolen the safe because they heard a rumor that it contained $6,000 in cash, Bachman said.

After the arrest, officers only had to follow the trail of scrapes the safe had made in the street to trace the getaway route back to the starting point.

“It left big marks in the asphalt,” Bachman said. “It wasn’t difficult to determine where it came from.”

The safe belongs to Silver’s Lock and Safe shop at 20929 Roscoe Blvd. John Cresswell, an operator of the business, said two weeks ago the shop moved to a new address on nearby DeSoto Avenue. In the process of moving, the safe, which is attached to steel casters, tipped over in front of the shop. It was too heavy to turn upright so the operators left it until they could rent a forklift.

It lay on its side on the sidewalk for two weeks. In the meantime, the rumor that it contained a treasure apparently began circulating on the street, police said.

“I don’t know how that started,” Cresswell said. “It weighs about 6,000 pounds, but it didn’t have $6,000 in it.”

Cresswell laughed when told the suspects apparently thought they could open the safe with tools. “You could put dynamite under it and it wouldn’t open,” he said.

Richardson and Defalco were being held at the Devonshire Division jail in lieu of $5,000 bail each.

Times photographer Boris Yaro contributed to this story.