Some thieves in Ohio might have a bridge to sell you — an actual 58-foot-long one they swiped.
Akron police can’t get over how the brazen bridge bandits made off with the pedestrian span after it had been removed from Middlebury Run Park along the Little Cuyahoga River during a wetlands restoration project, Fox 8 reported.
The city planned to repurpose the $40,000 bridge, which had been moved to a field along Seiberling Street, but police were notified last month that it had been stolen.
Investigators said the thieves stole the bridge in phases — first clearing some brush that had grown around it, then removing all of the deck boards and finally the entire metal frame, according to the Akron Beacon Journal.
Police spokesman Lt. Mike Miller said the bridge was relatively easy to dismantle.
“The bridge is almost all polymer, I’m told, and really just connected by some bolts, so if you have any equipment, sockets or anything of that nature, it wouldn’t have been very difficult at all to start the process of disassembling that,” he told Fox 8.
Police said they are unsure what the thieves plan to do with the bridge, which has little recycling value.
“It could be used for a variety of different things to include as simple as landscaping or they could use it for some other engineering project, some other large-scale project,” Miller said.
But police also suggested that the crooks really do want to turn a proverbial bridge sale into reality.
“Someone in the viewing area has access to some information that we need and this is the ‘whodunit’ where we really need the community’s help to point us in the right direction to find the people responsible for removing that bridge,” Miller said.
Anyone with information about the heist is asked to call detectives at 330-375-2490.