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 images 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 in search of to promote it for scrap steel, officers mentioned.
“It bothered me — I gained’t lie,” Kumar, 60, mentioned of the theft.
She is one in every 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 mentioned. “It’s about any individual having the audacity” to steal one thing constructed to honor academics, she mentioned.
Kumar attends a ceremony dedicating her plaque in 2018.
(Nupur Kumar)
Blumenfield’s workplace mentioned in an announcement Thursday that the theft “has created important sidewalk harm, in addition to the lack of these landmarks which can be each financially useful and significant to the encircling neighborhood.”
A number of plaques are put in every year by the Stroll of Hearts Basis, a nonprofit group that honors distinctive academics within the Valley.
Every plaque is price about $4,000 and weighs about 40 kilos, Los Angeles Police Capt. Rodolfo Lopez mentioned.
Lopez mentioned video captured somebody stealing 4 plaques in a single evening, however the footage was too blurry for facial recognition know-how to determine them. Seven extra plaques disappeared over the following few weeks, and Lopez mentioned the division believes the thefts are related.
Native steel scrap distributors have been alerted to the thefts and had been informed to contact police if somebody got here in to promote the plaques, Lopez mentioned.
The Los Angeles space has just lately seen a rise in thefts of steel objects, together with these fabricated from copper and bronze, that may be bought for scrap.
The sixth Avenue Viaduct’s well-known lights just 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, mentioned in an e mail that the thefts from Woodland Hills “violated the neighborhood in some ways.” The particular person accountable has “stolen not only a bronze plaque,” he mentioned, however “a bit of a instructor’s legacy.”
In complete, the stolen plaques had been price about $44,000, not together with the price of sidewalk repairs.
Kumar retired final yr from Canoga Park Excessive and mentioned the plaque was a part of her legacy. As a Hindu, she will probably be cremated when she dies, she mentioned, 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.”
