David Weisberg was walking the Santa Susana Pass last month ahead of an annual volunteer clean-up event when he noticed something strange — down the pass, there was a pile of safes.
He pointed it out to his girlfriend, Nancy Nicoloro, and they walked about an eighth of a mile more before they saw an ATM on its side and a broken safe surrounded by passports, living trusts and other important documents. In total, Weisberg said they found 11 safes, many just off the 118 Freeway’s Rocky Peak exit on Santa Susana Pass Road.
Weisberg put anything he could fit in his pockets and planned to give more to the police during the clean-up event for his group, Volunteers Cleaning Communities, the following week. Before that, he returned to the area, finding more legal documents and college diplomas.
“This is stuff I wouldn’t want other people getting a hold of,” Weisberg thought.
He brought the items that he could carry to Nicoloro. Using the various legal documents, Nicoloro organized the documents based on which family owned them, and she scoured social media to get in touch with the owners. Those efforts helped them get in touch with families like the Ramages in Glendora.
In late August, Kenn Ramage, 68, and his wife were on a trip in Long Beach, when they learned that burglars broke the bedroom window in their Glendora home, took jewelry, a laptop and the family’s gun safe and drove away.
Last week, his daughter, who’s living in Munich, Germany, got a message from Weisberg’s girlfriend Nicoloro through social media. After confirming that her family’s home had been burglarized, she told her parents the news and connected them with Nicoloro and Weisberg.
Ramage and his wife drove out to meet Weisberg and Nicoloro that night and collect what they had been missing — birth certificates, passports, old car titles and his daughter’s wedding album. Other than water damage from the recent rain, Ramage said everything was in good condition.
The couple also asked Weisberg and Nicoloro where they’d found the safes and headed out themselves to see if anything else had been left behind.
“Probably the most surreal thing was to go off the side of the road and look at all these documents that were previously in your safe or your lockbox at the bank,” Ramage said, “and looking at it seeing all those things just sitting out there in the open like that, it was a strange thing.”
Gathering their lost documents and photos provided the family some closure, Ramage said, but some of their most valuable items weren’t recovered, including his wife’s diamonds and an antique family gun. Still, he said he’s grateful for everything Weisberg and Nicoloro did to help return their things.
“Those guys going to all the effort to call us, that’s pretty cool,” Ramage said.
In total, Nicoloro and Weisberg identified five families whose belongings were in the pass. They personally returned items to four families, they said. The couple isn’t sure how long the safes were down the pass, but the families they talked with dealt with robberies between September and January.
Nicoloro thought it would be good if her and Weisberg returned the items on their own to help relieve some of the workload on law enforcement. She also hoped to connect with people who had lost their belongings on a personal level.
“Let’s do our jobs as humans who care about people,” Nicoloro said. “We really thought we were helping by doing that.”
Burglaries are common in his neighborhood, Ramage said.
The officer who responded to their home said he came from a burglary just down the street, and a month before Ramage’s house was burglarized, someone attempted to steal from one of their neighbor’s homes. And even though Ramage had video of the burglary at his home, he hasn’t heard if police caught any suspects in the case.
He believes there may be a crime ring in the area using the Santa Susana Pass as a dumping ground for their items and hopes investigators are able to catch whoever is involved. The items in the pass, he said, were from families across the region, from the west side to the San Gabriel Valley.
The Los Angeles Police Department didn’t immediately respond to multiple requests for information on the stolen safes and ATM, but Weisberg said police reached out to him to learn the exact location where the safes were dropped. Officers arrived at the scene with police vehicles and helicopters, he said.
Weisberg and Nicoloro said they returned about 90% of what they found to the families they could identify, but police have most of the remaining items. Anyone who believes Weisberg and Nicoloro might have found their belongings should reach out to their local police department for more information.