Thieves Take Electronics, Toys, Force Stockton Summer Camp To Cancel
STOCKTON (CBS13) — A Stockton kids camp was canceled after the owner says burglars broke in and made off with about $8,000 worth of toys and electronics.
It happened at the Bricks 4 Kids summer camp on West March Lane and owner Brent Fuji said he is devastated.
"It's just a terrible thing all the way around," Fuji said.
He had planned to start two summer camps Monday for kids ages six to 11. One was for the younger kids with activities loosely based on the LEGO Movie.
"So we would have built characters and played games and done some arts and crafts," Fuji said.
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The second camp was set to focus on mechanical engineering with the older kids. Fuji said in the afternoon he planned to build with LEGOs and talk about engineering concepts.
But the thieves had other plans. They reportedly scaled a gate and used a fire extinguisher to bash in the door and get inside.
"[They] took a large screen TV that I used to do my powerpoint presentations for the kids. They also took all of 10 laptops that I used for my robotics and coding classes," Fuji said.
He said the thieves took their time going from room to room, stealing approximately 20 Kindle Fire tablets, which the students logged onto to get their instruction plans, and proprietory LEGO kits with enough parts to build up to 350 objects.
Fuji said the thieves turned on the air conditioning and even helped themselves to the kids' snacks.
"The worst thing for me is to see the kids show up for camp today and give them the news that we had to cancel and to see them very very sad and upset; it's disheartening," Fuji said.
Fuji is concerned the theft will now impact a school enrichment program he planned to teach in dozens of classrooms because he needed to laptops to run coding plans for advanced robotics classes.
He's hoping the thieves are either caught or have a change of heart so it doesn't ruin summer for dozens of kids. Police were able to get fingerprints and Fuji is now checking with a neighboring business to see whether they captured the suspects on surveillance cameras.
