It wasn’t Steve Craig’s most exciting bust of all time. But Mountain View High School sports fans have the school resource officer to thank for figuring out exactly where their bleachers disappeared to just in time for the fall sports season.

Craig, a Bend police officer who serves as Mountain View’s school resource officer, had plenty of luck in determining that the $8,000 set of bleachers met their demise in a Bend scrap yard. And they were sold as scrap metal for about $140.

School officials noticed last week that the small set of bleachers, which were used for fans at the varsity soccer field and sometimes for football fans, had gone missing.

“When the district came — normally they come to get our fields ready for games — they tried to locate them, and one little set of bleachers wasn’t there,” said Dave Hoody, Mountain View’s athletic director. “We started doing some investigation.”

Hoody said the bleachers were stored out of sightbut outside at the back of the school. Items like that are often shared among the school district’s locations.

Mountain View Assistant Principal Sean Corrigan sent a districtwide e-mail checking to see whether the bleachers had been loaned out. When he received no response, he contacted Craig.

When Craig returned to work Tuesday, he started digging around. The first place he checked was Schnitzer Steel, which is about four miles south of the high school. Schnitzer Steel is a metal recycling company that has a scrap yard in southeast Bend.

Across the street

“This is where the really good police work comes into play,” Craig said, laughing. “I went to Schnitzer, thinking it was a dead end, and I talked to them and they brought me out to the yard.”

The scrap yard had already shipped the bleacher’s seats to a recycling center in Eugene, but the frame was still there. When Craig asked about the person who had brought in the metal, Mick Hunter, the yard manager, pointed across the street.

“The guy who brought them in was sitting in a pickup across the street,” Craig said. “I went over and talked to him, got a statement and placed him under arrest. It couldn’t have happened any better except if I’d been there when he was taking them apart.”

Craig identified the suspect as Anthony John Gonzalez, a 36-year-old Bend resident. Gonzalez, who lives near the high school, has been released, and the case has moved to the Deschutes County District Attorney’s Office. He was arrested on charges of first-degree theft, which carries a maximum sentence of five years in jail and a fine.

Craig said Gonzalez told him he’d seen the bleachers sitting out in the west lot, and they appeared damaged. He called the school to ask if he could take them, and the school never got back to him.

“He said he took it upon himself to dismantle them. Those are his own words, ‘Took it upon himself,’” Craig said.

Hunter said Gonzalez has been a regular at the scrap yard for the past year. While Gonzalez didn’t usually deal in that type of metal, he told Hunter that he’d been told he could take the damaged bleachers. Hunter said he saw a bit of damage to the bleachers and, since he’d dealt with Gonzalez before, he “had no reason to suspect him.”

“We keep track of all purchases with ID,” Hunter said. “What we do is anything that’s a large quantity we explain to people, ‘Can you show validity? Is it a legal piece of material?’”

The haul, which Hunter estimated weighed about 250 pounds, was aluminum with no steel attached. Hunter estimated he paid 57 cents a pound, or more than $140 for the bleachers.

Hoody, Mountain View’s athletic director, said while the district goes through the paperwork and deals with insurance companies, the school has moved two sets of bleachers normally used by the band during football games over to the soccer field.

“It’s quite a shock to us, we’ve never had anything like this happen,” Hoody said. “We’ve got to take steps to make sure that it doesn’t happen again, and what we’re actually probably going to do is pour concrete and leave them set up long term.”

‘A pretty bold move’

Mike Tiller, the district’s maintenance supervisor, said the theft demonstrated that the schools must rethink their security. The schools might stamp the bleachers with a district or school logo, or simply chain or cement them to a location.

“We’re kind of contemplating that, because it’s a pretty bold move,” Tiller said. “I don’t know, there aren’t many people qualified to take that large of an item.”

But Craig said with a few simple tools, it would have been fairly easy to take the bleachers apart.

“We’re looking at about $8,000, and we’ll go ahead and start the process of ordering replacements and put together an insurance claim,” said John Rexford, the assistant superintendent in charge of operations. “Obviously we’re seeking restitution, assuming the fellow is convicted.”

The district has not completed the insurance process yet but expects to have replacements in place in the next few weeks.

“I guess in the meantime there will be some standing spectators,” he said.