Three men arrested, accused of stealing AT&T lines serving rural California county
Three Stockton men were arrested over the weekend, accused of cutting and stealing cable and phone lines in an incident that left a rural California county’s dispatch center unable to receive 911 calls for several hours.
AT&T fiber optic cable lines were found cut near Highway 88 and Highway 124 in Ione around 9:30 a.m. Sunday — for the second time in as many weeks at the same location — the Amador County Sheriff’s Office said in a news release.
Deputies and California Highway Patrol personnel responded that afternoon to a report of a suspicious vehicle parked off of Highway 124 south of Ione, according to deputies. The reporting party told authorities that three men fled from the area of the vehicle into the nearby woods.
The vehicle, a red Ford SUV, had expired registration tags and was towed, sheriff’s officials wrote. A search turned up evidence of copper wire theft, “copious amounts of stripped copper wire” and drug paraphernalia inside the SUV, according to the news release.
Authorities also found a “freshly cut length of service wire” near the vehicle, sheriff’s officials wrote. The trio of suspects was reportedly interrupted by AT&T workers responding to the outage when they fled.
As deputies were processing the towed vehicle, one of the three men exited the woods and approached the deputies with his hands up, admitting he was the owner of the vehicle, the Sheriff’s Office wrote.
Deputies and CHP officers detained the first suspect, then followed three sets of footprints into a marshy area along Highway 124.
The two remaining suspects eventually emerged from the marsh and were detained, sheriff’s officials wrote. Authorities linked all three suspects, who were “covered in mud and sticks,” to the vehicle and the wire theft.
The three men were identified as Elpidio Rivera, 42; Joel Rivera-Villa, 25; and Hialario Lopez-Rodriguez, 35, all of Stockton.
All three were arrested and booked into the Amador County Jail on numerous charges including utilities theft, interference with power lines, conspiracy and drug possession. They are ineligible for bail, jail booking records show.
The AT&T outage left Sheriff’s Office dispatchers unable to receive most 911 calls made within Amador County. Dispatchers also could not make outgoing calls to other agencies, according to the sheriff’s news release.
The Amador County Sheriff’s Office ultimately forwarded 911 and non-emergency calls to the Calaveras County Sheriff’s Office dispatch center, which then emailed call information back to the Amador County dispatchers. Verizon Wireless also provided dispatchers two phones with Wi-Fi capabilities so that they could make outgoing calls, according to the news release.
The AT&T lines were repaired around 5:45 p.m. Sunday, and the dispatch center was able to resume normal operations.
The Sheriff’s Office said Sunday’s incident was at least the fourth time AT&T fiber cables have been cut, with the previous instance reported April 30. It was not immediately clear whether the three men arrested Sunday have been linked to any of the previous incidents.
