Theft Ring Preyed on Local Gardeners : Canoga Park: A landscaper finds his missing truck and investigators discover a garage filled with stolen tools. Three suspects have been identified.

It started as the routine recovery of a stolen truck, but when police stepped into the back yard of the house on Alabama Avenue in Canoga Park, they found a garage stockpiled with lawn mowers, edgers and other equipment believed stolen from landscapers.

On Friday, as they were still sorting through all the equipment, detectives said they had broken up a ring they believed preyed on professional landscapers by following them home from jobs and then stealing their trucks and equipment as they slept. Police called it a particularly cruel property crime.

“This kind of crime wipes them out,” Detective Robert Graybill said of the victimized landscapers. “Most of the people who do this for a living are not high-income people. They are out every day working from dawn to dusk. And this totally destroys them. They can’t get jobs without equipment.”

No arrests were made, but police said they had identified three suspects Friday.

Police credited a landscaper who came across his truck and then flagged down patrol officers.

Antonio Olmos, 36, of Van Nuys woke up Thursday morning and found his Toyota pickup, along with the equipment he used for his landscaping business, missing from his driveway, according to police. Olmos said he reported the theft, searched around his neighborhood for about an hour and then borrowed equipment from his brothers and used his old pickup truck to drive to work.

Olmos said his cousin called him about 5:30 p.m. and told him he had found his truck parked at a house.

Olmos subsequently drove to the 6900 block of Alabama Avenue and saw his truck parked alongside a house, Graybill said. He called police, but when a patrol car turned onto the street, three men fled from the house on foot and got away.

“I’m happy because I just finished paying off my truck,” Olmos said. “If my cousin hadn’t gone by that house, it would have been history. I’m lucky.”

Auto theft detectives called to the scene found the pickup truck had been partially stripped of parts. Graybill said he expected to possibly find a “chop shop”--a stolen vehicle stripping operation--in the back-yard garage, but instead found the three bays packed with lawn maintenance equipment.

“It was completely full of commercial quality landscaping equipment,” Graybill said. “I’ve never come across something of this scale.”

Graybill said there were 29 major pieces of equipment valued at more than $20,000 and several smaller items such as edgers, clippers and chain saws. He said investigators believe the suspects were specifically preying on landscapers, probably following them home from jobs to locate their homes.

“They key on the landscapers,” the detective said. “When they go home and are sleeping, they steal their equipment.”

The suspects, all of whom have prior arrest records for burglary, apparently planned to resell the equipment, but there was no indication of whether sales of similar equipment had already taken place, Graybill said.

Dennis C. Dix, president and chief executive officer of the Outdoor Power Equipment Institute, a national trade association representing manufacturers of lawn mowers, edgers and leaf vacuums, said he had never heard of thieves preying on landscapers before. He said he didn’t understand what they were planning to do with the lawn mowers, since most people buy new equipment and there is little demand for used items.

Graybill said the three suspects had been living in the house for four months and police believe the burglaries involving the equipment took place during that period. He said burglary detectives will attempt to match the equipment to stolen property reports.

“We hope to get these back to the victims as soon as possible,” Graybill said.

Times researcher Stephanie Stassel contributed to this report.