$65,000 in goods stolen from renters at Costa Mesa storage facility, police say

Rick Harlow has a tendency to hold onto the past.

Since he was a teenager, the 55-year-old Costa Mesa resident has commemorated every year of his life by filling a shoebox with concert tickets, postcards and other memorabilia he collected in the previous 365 days.

He kept the boxes in his garage, but when the building started leaking, he and his wife moved them and anything else they didn’t have room for into a public storage unit.

“We went there and we put our most valuable things there, thinking at least they won’t get wet and at least they’ll be safe,” he said.

But this week, Harlow discovered that many mementos he had hung onto had been pilfered. Many of his boxes were rummaged through and the valuables stolen, he said.

On Tuesday night, police called him to the Public Storage facility in the 2000 block of Newport Boulevard, where he rents space.

They had found boxes with his name on them in a unit where they had just served a search warrant, Harlow said.

At officers’ request, Harlow tried to open his storage unit, but the key wouldn’t fit the padlock. Someone had swapped out the lock, he said.

Police received a similar report from another renter a day earlier, said Costa Mesa police Sgt. Stephanie Selinske.

Police now estimate that $65,000 worth of property has been taken from five storage units at the facility — much of it still missing.

Authorities declined to provide many details because they’re still investigating. But Selinske said that after the initial call, detectives quickly discovered some missing items in or near another locker at the facility.

Police arrested Scott Treadway, a 36-year-old Huntington Beach resident who rents that unit, on suspicion of possessing stolen property, Selinske said.

Detectives are working to determine how the goods got from Harlow’s and other renters’ lockers into Treadway’s, Selinske said.

Harlow had trouble affixing a price to the items he lost.

Still missing from his locker are antique boxes of china and a 1920s projector that his family used to show flapper movies from that era.

Also gone is the drum set Harlow used to play in a band for 25 years. He bought the kit in high school with $1,000 his father gave him, but the sentimental value is much higher, he said.

“There’s countless stories like that,” Harlow said.

But coincidentally, the theft also reunited Harlow with a different part of his past. A friend he hadn’t seen since a high school reunion rents a storage unit where the lock also was swapped.

Harlow recounted the friend poking around and finding the sweater she wore as part of a cheerleading uniform for Newport Harbor High School.

“At least I have this,” she said, according to Harlow.

As he walked away, she called out to him again: “But they took the skirt.”

Police are looking for more possible theft victims and asked that anyone with information about the case call Det. Monte Peters at (714) 754-5198.