Vandals Wreck 25 Motor Homes at Saugus Plant : Crime: Owner suspects disgruntled present and former employees of doing $700,000 in damage.

Vandals started up 15 motor homes in a Saugus factory and drove them into each other and into the walls, doing about $700,000 damage, authorities said Wednesday.

“They just took them and ran them into posts and into each other at what looks to be 20 or 30 m.p.h.,” said Bill Rex, who owns Rexhall Industrial Inc., which manufactures the vehicles. “They smashed in the fronts and ripped the sides off of them.”

Los Angeles Sheriff’s Lt. Harvey Cantor stressed that the destruction was “in no way related to civil unrest in other areas of the county.” The company’s owner said he suspected present or former employees, angry over a dispute.

No one had been arrested for the felony vandalism, which Cantor described as a “unique” crime.

Employees discovered the destruction when they arrived for work Thursday at 6:50 a.m., Cantor said. As the employees walked into the 100,000-square-foot building that houses finished vehicles and a plant producing fiberglass parts, they heard a door slammed shut, Cantor said. They ran to the hills behind the building to scour the area for intruders, Cantor said.

The Sheriff’s Department, which was alerted by the employees, joined the search by car and helicopter but could not spot any suspects, he said.

A subsequent inventory revealed that the only item stolen from the building was one 13-inch color television worth $240, Cantor said. But the amount of damage was “unbelievable,” Rex said.

Authorities estimate that $40,000 in damage was done to each of 15 motor homes. An additional $100,000 in damage was done to equipment in the building and the building itself, Cantor said.

Keys to the vehicles stored in the warehouse are kept in the ignition, Rex said.

In addition to smashing the large vehicles into each other, it appeared that the vandals also had driven the motor homes through a portion of the warehouse where employees cast fiberglass parts and into support pillars “as if they were trying to cave in the building,” Rex said.

Rex suspects that someone with inside knowledge of the company may be responsible for the crime. He said he had caught some employees stealing microwaves from the motor homes and had them arrested. In addition, he said he had been fighting employees who had submitted “a lot of bogus workers’ compensation claims.”

The company said it has been hit by well over 100 claims for workers’ compensation benefits over the last two years, mainly from laid-off employees. The company has contested many of these cases, maintaining that the workers filing them were not injured on the job but falsely claimed workplace injuries.

In a recent letter to a council investigating California’s economic problems, the president of the company said that the company’s rising workers’ compensation costs, along with problems related to the weak national economy, have wiped out Rexall’s profits.

The company, which Rex founded in 1986, currently has about 150 employees and annual revenues of $25 million.

Rex said that the company would work through the loss. By Thursday afternoon, employees in the fiberglass division had volunteered to work through the weekend, 24 hours a day if necessary, to cast new fiberglass parts so that assembly could continue on more vehicles, Rex said.

Times staff writer Stuart Silverstein contributed to this story.