Crooks take lesson plans for special needs students

MESA, Ariz. - It looks like these thieves were just picking cars at random, grabbing whatever they could and in this case, they took a teacher's school laptop computer that had lesson plans and holiday projects all meant for her special needs students.

She's hoping they'll do the right thing and return it.

Surveillance cameras captured the suspects in the Mesa neighborhood Tuesday morning as one of them used a rock to bash in the side window of a vehicle and made off with a laptop computer in a bag that was in the backseat.

"They look like they've done this before and they know what to do," said Daniel Thompson.

Daniel and Tamara Thompson knew something was up when they heard their dog start barking at 2:30 a.m. The crooks were gone, but the camera captured it all.

"It looked like they were scoping out the area. There were three of them, walking up and down the street, using a flashlight, looking in the front, in the back, in the sides," said Tamara.

It only took seconds, but what the thief ran off with was more than just a computer. It contained Tamara's lesson plans for the special needs students she teaches, along with a bag of holiday crafts she had for the children.

"It is upsetting. It's upsetting that they did it to the kids. They ruined their fun for the day," she said.

The Thompsons weren't the only ones hit Tuesday morning. Three others on the street also had cars broken into. Daniel hopes the video will help catch these guys.

"And maybe either help prevent somebody else from suffering the same thing, or catching these people so they don't commit it again," he said.

"Especially with this season, people might be desperate to get money any way they can. Just take extra precaution and when you have that intuition, listen to it," said Tamara.

Tamara says this was the first time she left the computer in her vehicle and she wants to remind people not to leave anything valuable in their cars, especially this time of the year.