A team of college engineering students visiting Fort Worth from California say their truck and trailer were stolen from their hotel parking lot, but what was inside the trailer is the theft that hits the group the hardest.
The students from California State University-Northridge were in Fort Worth for the weekend to compete in a custom engineered remote-controlled plane competition, and that trailer contained their plane, tools and all of the components they'd worked the entire school year to design.
Eddie Rodriguez said he woke up in his room at the Fort Worth Radisson on Altamesa Boulevard Monday morning and looked out the window to see that the truck and trailer – which he'd borrowed from his father and sister – was completely gone.
He spoke to hotel staff who reviewed surveillance video from the parking lot with him, and they discovered that at about 5 a.m. or 6 a.m. someone simply drove the truck and trailer out of the lot, followed closely by a small car.
"At first I thought it was a prank," said Rodriguez. "And then it hit me like, wow, they stole my truck. They stole my truck and the trailer."
Rodriguez estimates the contents of the trailer, including the parts in that plane, to be worth about $15,000 alone, but he said the device carried value to the team that couldn't be put into dollars.
The team had just placed second with their craft the day before and had planned to take it back to California for more competitions and to eventually hang in their lab as inspiration for future teams.
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"We were so excited and so proud of it," said teammate Frank Mejia. "You know, winning second place and being the underdogs, and it just meant so much to us. And it's just gone now."
The team was preparing to make the 20-hour drive back home Monday, but instead spent most of the day filing police reports for the missing items and trying to figure out how to get their entire team home with one fewer vehicle.
Anyone with information on the theft is asked to contact Fort Worth police.
