The owner of a concrete and granite curbing company says he’s received little information from police more than a week after one of his work trucks was allegedly stolen and recovered, missing thousands of dollars worth of tools.
The lead investigator in the case, however, confirmed that the investigation is active and ongoing but said that the lack of cooperation has been on the company’s part.
“Of course it’s being investigated,” Lieutenant Richard King of the Windsor County Sheriff’s Department said in an interview. “We can pursue it a lot easier if the company wants to provide us with a list of stolen items.”
On Oct. 15, a 2023 Ford F-350 was stolen from an active job site in Bethel, according to Stoneface Earthworks, a Unity-based company that sends crews and equipment across the Connecticut River for jobs every week.
The owner of the company, Neil Prive, contacted police about the theft, and Ford to locate the truck through its GPS.
“But Ford required a subpoena, so the police subpoenaed Ford for a GPS ping,” Stoneface Earthworks said in a statement to the Valley News on Friday.
The day after the alleged theft, police used the GPS ping to locate the truck in Chelsea.
By the time Prive got to the site of where the truck was abandoned, police had already left and “all of our work tools and equipment were gone,” the statement said.
“The wiring under the hood had been pulled apart and someone had started disassembling the plow attachment,” the statement added. “We had the truck towed to a shop.”
The company has so far estimated the cost of stolen property to be between $15,000 and $20,000, “not counting downtime, repairs and the cost of replacing equipment heading into our winter plowing season,” according to the statement.
As far as the company is aware, after repeated attempts to reach the police, the Ford subpoena and initial observations of the missing equipment when the truck was found are the only steps law enforcement has taken.
“The truck was never fingerprinted or processed for evidence of any kind,” the statement said.
On Oct. 19, the company left a message for the Vermont State Police Royalton Barracks. A couple days later, a trooper returned the call and said the investigation had been turned over to the Windsor County Sheriff’s Department.
“The lead investigating officer is currently running for sheriff,” the statement said. “Our question is simple: Where is our investigation?”
King, the sole Republican to file for the 2026 Windsor County Sheriff’s seat with over 30 years of law enforcement experience, said he’s actively investigating the incident.
The trouble, King said, is that the company has not provided his department with “any detailed information on what’s missing.”
King said he has asked “several times.”
Additionally, the estimate the company provided King with on the cost of the allegedly stolen equipment was not between $15,000 and $20,000, but $50,000, he said.
About the company’s frustration with the vehicle not being processed for forensic evidence, King said that with a work truck, “chances are there have been several people inside that truck. It’s not like you see on ‘NCIS’ where you enter the DNA into a computer and a name pops up.”
“I’m just kind of scratching my head in that we went above and beyond to locate his truck, and found it in the middle of the woods,” King said. “The truck’s been recovered and insurance is going to cover the losses of your tools.”
That’s all true, Prive told the Valley News in an interview.
“But it’s an accountability thing,” Prive said. “Catch them. Do your job.”
Vehicle thefts are among the least-solved crimes in the country. Nationally, the share of motor vehicle thefts cleared by police fell from 26% in 1964 to 9% in 2022, according to the Council on Criminal Justice, and since 1967, fewer than one in five vehicle thefts has been cleared by an arrest or other means.
Prive acknowledged that his initial estimate for the cost of the lost tools was around $50,000. But he later told police, he said, that “we’re currently working on putting the list of tools together.”
“It takes a while, like we have to go through everything and figure out what was in the truck exactly,” he said. “When you got a tool bag that has multiple hammers, drill bits, levels, squares, you have to start pricing stuff and it takes a while.”
Prive remains dismayed at the police’s decision to not “waste resources,” as he said King told him, on fingerprinting the truck.
When the truck was recovered in the Chelsea woods, Prive said a note written on the back of a company receipt was left in the window that read “Will be back … Tranny problems.”
He said the note wasn’t scrawled by any of his crew members and that the day the truck was stolen, all his crew were over a hill on the job site at the time.
Also left behind inside the truck, he said, was a carrot cake.
Prive said he ended up paying a visit to the Tunbridge General Store, where the cake’s packaging said it was made, to see if there was any security footage.
The manager, he said, told him the store’s camera pointed at the register was “offline that day.”
“Can you come by and dust this carrot cake?” Prive said he asked King.
But King told Prive, as he also told the Valley News, those resources are reserved for major crimes like “homicides, rapes and burglaries.”
