Suspect in Fire Station Thefts

A former Ventura County Fire Department supply clerk who had hoped to become a firefighter has been charged with breaking into eight stations since March to steal petty cash and other possessions.

Paul F. Lopez, 34, of Oxnard could face up to eight years in prison if convicted in connection with the thefts, which frustrated detectives for months and caused the Fire Department to tighten security at stations from Simi Valley to the Rincon.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Kim Gibbons, who filed the complaint Wednesday charging Lopez with eight counts of burglary, reviewed reports of 15 fire-station break-ins that date back to October, 1993. Gibbons said they involved losses of about $2,000 in cash and several items--cameras, compact disc players, videotapes, even sunglasses--owned by firefighters.

Most, if not all, of the possessions have been surrendered to authorities by Lopez or his attorney, Gibbons said. One item, a firefighter’s buck knife, was recovered after a search warrant was served at the suspect’s house more than a month ago, the prosecutor added.

Lopez, who has resigned from the department he had long sought to serve, is suspected of using secret access codes or master keys to enter stations that were vacated after 911 dispatchers received false-alarm calls--at least three involving bogus motorcycle accident reports--from nearby telephones.

Detectives linked Lopez to the burglaries after viewing a surveillance tape that showed a man resembling him making a false accident report to a store clerk.

“Ever since he was right out of high school, he wanted to be a firefighter,” said Victor Salas Jr., Lopez’s Oxnard-based attorney and a boyhood friend who had been a Cub Scout and Boy Scout with Lopez in Santa Paula.

But because of a knee injury, Lopez was frustrated in his efforts to make the force, and he became, in Salas’ words, “depressed . . . and that led him into trouble in getting back at (the) institution.”

Lopez, who is married and has two daughters, had worked as a supply clerk for the Fire Department since May, 1989, after transferring from another county job that dated back to January, 1987. Contacted at home, Lopez declined to comment on the case. He is expected to appear in court Monday.

But Salas said his client denies taking any cash and added, “Everything he had taken, he’d kept. It was all at his house. He didn’t attempt to sell it or anything.”

Of the rash of burglaries, Battalion Chief Larry Whelan said, “I’ve been here for 30 years, and it’s the first time I’ve ever seen this happen. Naturally, we feel betrayed. We do like to see (the department) as one big happy family.”

Capt. Rod Sims of Station 54 in Camarillo, which was broken into one night in August, said, “Personally, there were a lot of guys that were hurt by this. . . . When you live with and trust people like that, it becomes a real upsetting thing. But there was great relief when we found out (the suspect) wasn’t an actual line-firefighter.”

In a key piece of evidence, a surveillance video camera at a gas station convenience store in Thousand Oaks shows a man asking the clerk on March 11 to call 911 to report a motorcycle accident, Detective Stan Weber of the Ventura County Sheriff’s Department said.

But there had been no such accident.

Just two blocks away, the fire crew at Station 31 responded to the 1 a.m. call and returned to their quarters about 15 minutes later. About $30 in food money was found to be missing the next morning, but--as with all of the other burglaries--there were no signs of forced entry into the station.

Though he originally targeted only one station a night, the thief soon began to slip into two or three stations an outing, typically making false-call reports from pay phones a short distance away, Weber said.

At midnight on Aug. 10, for example, Station 56 east of Mugu Rock was hit after receiving a false report of a motorcycle accident.

Then Station 25 on the Rincon was broken into after a bogus report of a trash bin fire at Faria Beach at 1:15 a.m.

Station 23 in Oak View was burglarized after a false report of a car accident at 2:30 a.m.

In each case, the call was made from a phone close by--less than a block away in the last theft. In neither case was the crew gone more than 30 minutes.

“It looks like somebody who knows the procedures on how to get into the stations,” Weber said after becoming the lead investigator of the thefts.

Lopez, as a supply clerk and courier based in the department’s warehouse in Ventura, routinely would take such materials as bandages, axes, fire hoses and safety clothing to any of the 30 stations throughout the county.

As such, he likely would have known the door-lock access codes used to enter the stations, said Battalion Chief Mark Sanchez of the department’s Human Resource Division.

“He’s a very nice, very courteous person . . . very interested in becoming a firefighter,” Sanchez said. “He always seemed very willing to please and to help.”

Among the false alarms that lured firefighters into the night, Weber added, was one involving a gas leak, another a person having a heart attack and one involving a tennis player with a broken ankle at Borchard Park in Newbury Park.