Truck stolen at Auburn Red Lion Inn held Oregon man’s livelihood

Jaycob Perkins of Oregon is used to traveling all over the Pacific Northwest for contract construction work. What he did not expect, however, was to have his construction truck stolen out of the Auburn Red Lion Inn parking lot last Wednesday night.

The theft did not just include the Ford F-350 dually truck in which Perkins has invested a great amount of care and maintenance; the truck bed was entirely packed full with tools worth at least $10,000 in total, including high-ticket items such as air compressors, chop saws, nail guns, and a generator.

“You feel violated, you know, I’m still kind of just trying to soak it in — I had everything in that truck,” he told KIRO Radio’s Dori Monson. “Every way of making money was involved with that thing.”

Worse than the the material loss is the fact that without his construction materials and mode of transportation, Perkins has also lost his livelihood for the foreseeable future. It comes at a challenging time; he and his wife have 8-month-old twins and a 4-year-old at home, and, as KIRO 7 TV reported, his wife is a full-time student who just had surgery.

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“It’s definitely a bump in the road for sure — we’re kind of scrambling, trying to figure out what we’re going to do,” Perkins said. “It’s hard to do anything … but I’ve got to stay positive for my family’s sake.”

While he knows to watch out for theft in the Puget Sound, Perkins said it would not be realistic to carry an entire truck bed’s worth of construction equipment into his hotel room for safekeeping every night. Because his insurance is very basic, it is not covering any part of the theft.

“You never think this kind of thing is going to happen to you,” he said.

He was especially surprised because his old, high-mileage truck is a pain to start at all. He has no idea how the thieves managed it without a key.

Auburn police told him that it is unlikely he will get the truck and tools back, as these sorts of vehicles are normally stripped and sold for parts.

In the meantime, Perkins can still do excavation work without his tools, but the excavation gigs he had lined up are in the Auburn area — a place he now has no way to get to.

“It potentially could put me out of business,” he said of the crime.

Perkins asks everyone to keep an eye out for a grey flatbed F-350 with a crew cab.

“You can’t miss the thing — she’s big and ugly,” he joked.

If you would like to help out the family, you can do so at their GoFundMe.

Listen to the Dori Monson Show weekday afternoons from 12-3 p.m. on KIRO Radio, 97.3 FM. Subscribe to the podcast here.