A man who police say was attempting to steal copper wire caused $100,000 in damage in the El Sereno area, after a concerned citizen spotted what looked like three men sawing apart a bus bench in the middle of the night. Two people are now in custody, and the case remains ongoing.
According to NBC Los Angeles, the citizen called police just before 2 a.m. after seeing what appeared to be three men cutting apart a bus bench with an electric saw. LAPD officers responding to the 5000 block of Valley Boulevard found an open manhole behind the bus bench, with two of the three suspects inside, police told the outlet. Inside that underground vault, the men had allegedly attempted to steal copper wire, causing damage the outlet's report described in two ways — in one instance as $100,000 in damages, and elsewhere as about $100,000 in estimated damages.
One of the suspects fell down the hole and needed help from the Los Angeles Fire Department to climb back out, the station's report states. That suspect was then taken to a hospital for evaluation. The report notes two people are in custody while the investigation continues, though it does not address what became of the third person the caller said they saw at the scene.
A Citywide Pattern of Vault Raids and Darkened Streets
The El Sereno case lands amid what city officials and state regulators describe as a surge in copper wire theft across Los Angeles. A Los Angeles City Council motion filed with the Los Angeles City Clerk found that thieves had darkened 3,738 streetlights across Boyle Heights, Lincoln Heights and El Sereno, and that the 6th Street Viaduct itself went dark after criminals made off with tens of thousands of dollars' worth of copper. That motion proposed forming a Copper Wire Task Force pairing the LAPD with the city's Bureau of Street Lighting, funded in part by shifting $200,000 from a Council District 14 allocation into the Police Fund.
The fallout has reached residents directly. CBS Los Angeles reported that crews repaired 400 streetlights in El Sereno and Lincoln Heights after copper theft and aging infrastructure left those neighborhoods in the dark, with Councilmember Ysabel Jurado tapping more than $1 million from her discretionary fund to cover the work. Her office said the repair project began in November 2025, and that crews added new security measures meant to deter future theft and hold down costs going forward, per the same report.
Backlogs and Statewide Numbers Tell a Bigger Story
The scale of the problem shows up in the paperwork, too. City data cited by CBS Los Angeles showed more than 37,000 streetlight repair requests had piled up by the fall of the previous year, with over half still awaiting service, while the Bureau of Street Lighting told the station that 15% of the system was affected by outages and nearly half of all service requests traced back to wire theft. The Los Angeles Times separately reported the bureau logged nearly 46,000 outage service requests citywide in 2024, with almost 40% tied to wire theft, and that more than 38,000 feet of copper had been stripped from the 6th Street Bridge since it reopened in 2022, racking up $2.5 million in taxpayer-funded repairs.
Statewide, the issue has drawn the attorney general's attention. Spectrum News reported that California logged nearly 6,300 reported telecommunications theft and vandalism incidents in 2025, more than double the count in Texas, with Los Angeles alone accounting for over 1,100 of those incidents. The outlet also noted a separate Los Angeles bust that recovered roughly 3,000 feet of stolen telecommunications wire valued at more than $100,000.
Manhole Arrests Have Become a Recurring Scene
El Sereno is not the only neighborhood where suspected copper thieves have been found inside a manhole. In a separate West Los Angeles case, the Los Angeles Times reported that 25-year-old Elliaz Natividad was arrested after being found inside a manhole in the View Park-Windsor Hills neighborhood while allegedly attempting to steal copper wire.
