Concord daycare's van stolen

CONCORD, Calif. (KTVU) - A daycare in Concord is asking for the public’s help in finding their van that was stolen over the weekend with 10 car seats inside.

The van belonged to Dianne Adair at Westwood Enrichment Center in Concord. Debbie Trammel, the site director, said the daycare serves 90 children and they use the van to serve about a third of those kids.

“We transport children every day from another school over here for their care,” Trammel said. “The kids are now concerned about their summertime and how this is going to impact the field trips that we do.”

Dianne Adair at Westwood sits on the property of Westwood Elementary School on West Street. Surveillance cameras at the elementary school captured two men walking onto the daycare parking lot around 9:00 p.m. Friday. Hours later at approximately 2:00 a.m. Saturday, a man and woman are seen on the property. In that same hour the van was driven around a gate and off the property. It was last seen headed toward Concord Blvd.

Trammel said the daycare has another van that they are now using to work double duty. In addition to the theft, someone has been siphoning gas out of their vans for the past few months, costing them several hundred dollars. It has happened at three different Dianne Adair locations in Concord. They installed locking gas caps on the vans, but the gas kept getting stolen.

“It just seemed coincidental that we would fill the vans up with gas and the next day the gas would all be gone,” Trammel said.

The stolen van is a 2006 model Ford E350. It is the same van that was stolen last year from the daycare and recovered three weeks later at an apartment complex in Bay Point. No arrests were made in that case.

Sgt. Carl Cruz with the Concord Police Department said this crime is unfortunate because it ultimately impacts children.
“We have the technology to sharpen some of the images [on surveillance],” Cruz said. “What I intend to do is put this on our Facebook page to see if the community can help us identify who these guys are.”

He called the people seen in the surveillance video persons of interest. He believes the people responsible are the same ones that stole the van last year.

“It raises some issues into who these guys are and what intimate knowledge they have that they did the same crime a year later, almost to the day,” Cruz said.

Trammel hopes the van is returned so they can take children on field trips and other activities. The van has a California license plate: 5XXL760. 

Anyone with information is asked to call the Concord Police Department.