Every bronze plaque is value about $4,000 and weighs about 40 kilos, officers stated.

When Vandana Kumar’s household visited her in Los Angeles, they at all times stopped at a bronze plaque embedded in a Woodland Hills sidewalk that honored her 25 years as a science instructor at Canoga Park Excessive College.

Her household posed for pictures with the plaque, which was put in in 2018, as if it had been part of the Hollywood Stroll of Fame. After which, inside the previous couple of weeks, it was ripped out — most definitely by somebody looking for to promote it for scrap steel, officers stated.

“It bothered me — I received’t lie,” Kumar, 60, stated of the theft.

She is certainly one of 11 academics whose honorary plaques have been ripped from a Victory Boulevard sidewalk in Woodland Hills over the past month. Los Angeles Metropolis Councilmember Bob Blumenfield introduced a $25,000 reward this week for info resulting in an arrest within the thefts.

“It’s not about my plaque,” Kumar stated. “It’s about someone having the audacity” to steal one thing constructed to honor academics, she stated.

Kumar attends a ceremony dedicating her plaque in 2018.

(Nupur Kumar)

Blumenfield’s workplace stated in a press release Thursday that the theft “has created vital sidewalk injury, in addition to the lack of these landmarks which might be each financially priceless and significant to the encircling neighborhood.”

A number of plaques are put in annually by the Stroll of Hearts Basis, a nonprofit group that honors distinctive academics within the Valley.

Every plaque is value about $4,000 and weighs about 40 kilos, Los Angeles Police Capt. Rodolfo Lopez stated.

Lopez stated video captured somebody stealing 4 plaques in a single evening, however the footage was too blurry for facial recognition expertise to establish them. Seven extra plaques disappeared over the subsequent few weeks, and Lopez stated the division believes the thefts are related.

Native steel scrap distributors have been alerted to the thefts and had been instructed to contact police if somebody got here in to promote the plaques, Lopez stated.

The Los Angeles space has lately seen a rise in thefts of steel objects, together with these manufactured from copper and bronze, that may be bought for scrap.

The sixth Road Viaduct’s well-known lights lately went darkish after thieves stole the bridge’s copper wiring. Greater than 100 plaque thefts have been reported from two cemeteries in Carson and Compton, and a bronze newsboy statue in MacArthur Park was stolen.

Joseph Andrews, the founding father of the Stroll of Hearts Basis, stated in an e mail that the thefts from Woodland Hills “violated the neighborhood in some ways.” The individual accountable has “stolen not only a bronze plaque,” he stated, however “a chunk of a instructor’s legacy.”

In complete, the stolen plaques had been value about $44,000, not together with the price of sidewalk repairs.

Kumar retired final 12 months from Canoga Park Excessive and stated the plaque was a part of her legacy. As a Hindu, she can be cremated when she dies, she stated, so the plaque was a bodily reminder of who she was — a lot in order that she used to joke along with her principal, “once you see flowers on my plaque, you’ll know I’m gone.”