Bradley Marshall Jr. parked his Chevy pickup truck next to the construction site on Linda Avenue, a tree-lined Piedmont street where he had been hired to fix a leaking waste line.
Finding no one at the customer’s, Marshall sat in the truck and waited while jotting down estimates on a clipboard. Then he heard a knock on the passenger side window and saw a figure in a ski mask. Turning to the driver’s side, he caught a glimpse of the barrel of a semi-automatic pistol aimed squarely at his head.
“I raise my hands,” Marshall said, recalling his shock that July day in 2021 as a shudder ran down his throat. “I said, ‘Just take everything.'”
Within seconds, the thieves forced Marshall into the street and fled in his Chevy, which was stuffed with expensive plumbing tools: a new $15,000 sewer flusher, saw cutter, jackhammers, two sewer snakes, extension cords, copper, and a mechanical shovel. Piedmont police later arrested three people, but Marshall said he couldn’t positively identify them because they were wearing masks.
The truck theft at gunpoint was one in a string of power tool robberies in the Bay Area over the past year, a crime that appears to be rising and bolder, leaving some contractors in a state of constant fear.
“I’ve worked down here for 20 years and it’s never been like this,” said Marshall, whose family business Harry Clark Plumbing and Heating is suffering the emotional and financial toll of these robberies. According to Marshall’s father, Bradley Marshall Sr., thieves have stolen at least eight trucks and dozens of tools from the company over the past 18 months.
Jose Ramos, a plumber at Oakland Rooter Plumbing Co., works on a sewer inspection camera in Oakland.
Stephen Lam / The Chronicle
Such is the fear in the East Bay that at a recent meeting of the Plumbing-Heating-Cooling Contractors Association in Oakland, Mr. Rooter Plumbing board member Spencer Ferguson implored his colleagues to pool their money and hire a safety consultant for active gunnery and self-defense training .
“We found a person from Los Angeles who does training on what to do if someone puts a gun in your face,” said another Oakland plumber, Heiko Dzierzon, explaining how companies that normally compete, now work together to organize a training session. The club’s chief executive, Krystal Reddoch, said she wholeheartedly supports the effort.
Statistics from law enforcement suggest the plumbers’ concerns are justified. Oakland police said they had seen a spike in armed robberies involving power tools over the past four months, and officers investigated four such robberies and made two arrests in January alone. Contractors who spoke to The Chronicle also noted incidents in Vallejo and San Francisco. No pattern was known to police departments in those cities, although a spokesman for San Francisco’s robbery department said burglaries at construction sites were common.
Some cite evidence that thieves are using digital marketplaces to offload their stolen goods — possibly the same e-commerce sites that encourage organized retail theft. Dzierzon searched eBay for a seller with a massive inventory of plumbing and power tools and 1,600 documented sales. An eBay spokesman who was shown links to the seller’s listings did not comment directly, but said the company “has zero tolerance for criminal activity on our platform and has programs and policies in place to monitor our marketplace for stolen items.” “.
Unconvinced, Dzierzon insisted e-commerce platforms were full of looted items, and said he’d seen at least one other sign of a complicated crime ring in action: Weeks ago, he received a call from Las Vegas Police Department detectives who said they had discovered a $2 million cache of tools, one of which bore the logo of Dzierzon’s company PipeSpy. The tool was worth between $1,500 and $1,800, Dzierzon said.
While break-ins and theft have always been a business hazard, plumbers and handymen say criminals have become more methodical and aggressive over the past two years. Thieves routinely stake out warehouses or follow work trucks to jobs, preying on workers who have to toil in a fixed location for long periods of time, leaving their vehicles and equipment unattended. The perpetrators are increasingly wielding weapons.
Carpenters, painters, builders and other tradesmen all need to watch out for these types of crimes, especially with empty downtown areas amid the pandemic and projects still ongoing, said Andreas Cluver, secretary and treasurer of the Alameda County Building Trades Council.
He acknowledged that Mom and Dad’s work teams are more vulnerable because they may have to park far away and lug their own power tools to a job site. In contrast, union workers in large locations typically have guards and tool sheds to lock their equipment.
This could explain why the power tool crime wave has hit small plumbing companies hard, prompting workers to compulsively check their surroundings or leave work to make sure their trucks are still parked outside.
“My crew was robbed of video equipment at gunpoint twice in three weeks,” said Ygnacio Becerra, owner of Oakland Rooter Plumbing Co., referring to a spate of robberies in the fall when his company was busy repairing sewers in Oaklands Dimond and Laurel Districts – Works that require expensive cameras with radio transmitters that can locate failed spots in sewers.
Handymen are so desperate that some require armed security guards in their contracts, while others, like Ferguson, occasionally include an extra worker in contract offers “just to watch and deter.” Some contractors are refusing to service Oakland neighborhoods they find dangerous — a plumber in Castro Valley said he’s limited his work in Oakland to big jobs at homeowners’ associations he’s known for years.
Pacific Gas & Electric Co. has hired Oakland police officers to protect construction sites, police department officials said — a utility spokesman said PG&E is “constantly evaluating the threat environment and taking appropriate action to ensure the safety of our onsite workers.” Businesses of all sizes have hardened their infrastructure and vehicle fleets, installing GPS devices and kill switches on trucks — though thieves have learned how to bypass those mechanisms, Marshall Jr. said.
Jose Ramos, a plumber at Oakland Rooter Plumbing Co., carries a sewer inspection camera to his work truck in Oakland. The company’s employees were robbed of their equipment twice in September and three of its vehicles were stolen last year.
Stephen Lam / The Chronicle
Dzierzon suffered several harrowing thefts over the past two years, including a shock on New Year’s Day 2021 when the perpetrators drove a pickup truck through the roll-up door of his Oakland store before searching the location for tools and pipe inspection cameras. Last year, robbers stopped at one of his construction sites in the Oakland hills, put a gun to the foreman’s head and ordered all workers to go behind a house while they were dumping tools from a company truck, Dzierzon said.
Though the sudden intensification of these power tool antics has left law enforcement in trouble, criminologists point to several converging factors.
“You need a few ingredients to start a crime spree, and one of them is opportunity and one is incentive,” said Stanford University law professor George Fisher. Incentives — namely needs and desires — don’t change over time, he said, but opportunities and circumstances do change.
With fewer people carrying cash these days, it’s no longer profitable to rob people on a street, which may explain why thieves have taken to breaking into garages, stealing catalytic converters, raiding drugstore shelves, or stealing tools. E-commerce sites provide a convenient portal for selling loot, often with relative anonymity.
Fisher also wondered if precautions like locks and kill switches have made thieves more confrontational, using guns to claim items they can’t easily snatch from a locked vehicle.
Oakland Police Department investigators attributed the frequency and severity of these assaults to the fact that “power tools are in high demand and victims offer little to no resistance,” a department spokesman said.
But contractors who have seen or imagined the metallic flash of a gun in their driver’s side window say they understand why a person goes deaf and obeys orders.
“We pretty much told our guys to step down, put your hands up and don’t risk your life or try to be a hero,” said Mike Bonetti of Frank Bonetti Plumbing in Castro Valley.
Bradley Marshall Jr agreed.
Since last year’s truckjacking, he’s become more nervous and strategic, only carrying tools that are “absolutely necessary” for a job. He was willing to sacrifice them, he said, because “no tool is worth your life.”
Rachel Swan is a contributor to the San Francisco Chronicle. Email: rswan@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @rachelswan
