Eyes in Maui sky find
stolen backhoe

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Associated Press

OMAOPIO, Hawaii >> A Maui contractor whose backhoe was stolen from a job site took to the skies to locate his missing equipment.

Lloyd Norquist and his business partner enlisted helicopter pilot Jamie Lawrence to help them find the $70,000 backhoe.

"We wanted to find it as soon as possible," said Norquist, a civil engineering contractor. "We knew whoever did take it was going to start destroying the thing.

"Our intent was to get it back as soon as possible and with as little damage as possible," he said.

Lawrence spent about an hour Wednesday with Norquist and his partner Pete Sullivan, flying from Omaopio to Kula and Kanaio looking for backhoes resembling the stolen machine.

They found it in the yard of a residence three miles from where it was taken. As it turned out, it was the first one they spotted from the air, Lawrence said.

The machine was partially under a tree near a house, and with no other heavy equipment nearby, the backhoe seemed out of place, Lawrence said.

But it wasn't difficult to spot the 23-foot-long, 8-foot-wide machine, which weighs 17,000 pounds, from the air.

Norquist said he and Sullivan used the serial number to identify the backhoe in the yard as their missing machine.

As Norquist had suspected, the backhoe was being used to knock down trees and had been damaged, with the fuel cap cut off.

The people at the residence told police that someone else had dropped off the backhoe at the house.

Police did not arrest anyone for the theft but are conducting an investigation, said Maui police Lt. William Fernandez of the Criminal Investigation Division.