Mystery surrounds apparent theft of roof from house

What someone took from an home in Albuquerque, New Mexico, has a neighborhood baffled. It couldn’t have been easy, but someone swiped an entire roof right off a house. Now the homeowner wants to know who these mystery men are. From the front, the home in northwest Albuquerque looks normal. However, when Cory Archuleta went to check the mail on Saturday, he noticed something major was missing. All of the shingles from his roof were gone. “Even the police officer couldn’t believe it,” Archuleta said.

He said his insurance adjuster also had to laugh about it at one point. “She said that they’ll have to claim it as ‘stolen,'” he chuckled, still baffled by the strange theft. He learned from neighbors that before the weekend, someone had stripped the entire roof off of the house. “That’s all they left,” said Archuleta, pointing to a few shingles on the ground. He’s been in the process of selling the house, and the future resident hasn’t moved in yet. “My first thought was to call the realtor to see if maybe the new owners were doing anything yet,” Archuleta recalled. “But we haven’t closed on the house so I don’t know why they’d be working on it.”
He called his realtor, Alex Morgan. “He said, ‘well, my roof is gone. The original roof is gone,'” Morgan recalled. “And I was like, ‘what? How the hell is that possible? How does somebody steal a roof?'” Neighbors tell Archuleta they saw a crew there on Thursday and Friday tearing the roof off, but they didn’t think it was suspicious at the time. “They just figured it was part of the sale of the house,” said Archuleta. “They were in a truck with no sign, no business signs on it, so nobody knows who they are.” The home didn’t need a new roof. Archuleta said the houses in the neighborhood are fairly new. Whoever did all that work mostly cleaned up after themselves.

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“They put the tar paper back,” Archuleta pointed out. His best guess is that someone ordered a new roof, just not this address. “It’s just surprising that they did do all that work and then you know, must have found out they were at the wrong residence and decided to stop where they were at,” Archuleta said. He hopes the mystery men might return to finish the job. Archuleta is now working to get the roof replaced before it rains. So far no one has come forward to claim a mistaken job location. Neighbors said the mystery men were in a silver extended cab pick-up truck with a white flat-bed trailer. On the bright side, Archuleta said the new owner will be getting a new roof. In the meantime, Archuleta has to fork out $1,000 up-front for his insurance deductible.