Kids Steal Bob

Sometime after midnight on June 11, someone stole the Bob’s Big Boy statue from in front of the restaurant located at 27313 Jefferson Avenue in Temecula. Store general manager Laura Roberts noticed the statue missing when she arrived to open the restaurant at 6:00 a.m.

“It was the first thing I noticed when I turned in to our parking lot,” said Roberts. She called the Temecula Police Department, and they arrived about half an hour later to take a report. The five-foot-high statue was ripped off its base, leaving only Bob’s shoes. Tire tracks indicated that the perpetrators backed up some kind of truck over the sidewalk to load the statue.

At about 9:15 a.m., the head custodian from Great Oaks High School called Roberts to say the crime had been solved: Bob was out front greeting students as they arrived for the day’s classes (the senior class had graduated the night before).

Temecula police sent a police truck over to pick up the statue and returned it to the restaurant. The bad guys had evenly sawed off Bob’s shattered fiberglass ankles — which had been ripped from his shoes on the statue’s base — so Bob could stand up without props.

Roberts says a new statue will cost between $2000 and $4000. Restaurant owner Matt Pike, who owns other Bob’s franchises in San Diego and Riverside counties, was quoted in the Californian newspaper as saying, "Maybe it's a trend and we are getting back to normalcy in this country. People are getting back to stealing Bobs again. Kids being kids and stealing Bob.

In May, a Bob statue was stolen by two teens in Bakersfield. That statue — taken ten days before the restaurant was set to open — was valued at $6000.