By JON BAKER

LINCOLN — For nearly 27 years now, Brian Sullivan has been involved with the police department.
In all that time, Chief Sullivan never has seen a report like the one filed early Tuesday morning.

Police arrested Stephen M. Silva, 46, of 80 Kings St. in Johnson, for attempted larceny of aluminum guard railing from the Lonsdale Avenue bridge near the Cumberland/Lincoln line.
Though Sullivan didn’t know the value of such guard rails, he did say it was a felony.
“We received a call at about 11:30 p.m. (Monday) that an individual was using a reciprocating saw on the railings, and Patrolmen Sean Gorman and Ryan Laboissonniere responded to it,” Sullivan stated Tuesday afternoon.
“When they arrived on scene, they heard the individual run through the woods, and also observed a pickup truck parked in the driveway of a house that had been condemned; that was located at 1693 Lonsdale Ave.”
Upon investigating, Gorman and Laboissonniere found in the bed of that truck seven approximate 10-foot pieces of guard rail, not to mention a cordless reciprocating saw, one Sullivan called a “motorized hack saw.”
With the help of Cumberland Police, and after garnering a thermal imaging device borrowed from the Lonsdale Fire Department, officers found Silva hiding in a wooded area across the street from the aforementioned driveway.
After a brief struggle, the suspect was arrested, transported to headquarters for processing and placed in jail. On Tuesday morning, he was arraigned by Justice of the Peace Michael Higgins and moved to the Adult Correctional Institute in Cranston.
“During the arraignment, Mr. Silva was also presented as a Superior Court violator for leaving the scene o the accident with personal injury occurring,” Sullivan said.
The police chief also called it a brazen and crazy kind of crime, and that it may have had something to do with the economy.
“This is not a common thing in Lincoln; I’ve never seen anything like this, so -- yes -- it’s a first for me,” he claimed. “I mean, it was about 11:30 at night, but Lonsdale Avenue is a pretty busy street. He still found a way to get those seven sections into the back of the pickup. I don’t know how long he was there, but he must have done a lot of jumping in and out of the woods (to continue his ‘handiwork’) when cars came by.
“(Selling) scrap metal is a big thing, I guess,” he added. “Then again, this wasn’t scrap metal. Those rails serve a purpose for the roadway and sidewalk.”
Sullivan noted the detective unit is attempting to contact the state’s bridge maintenance unit to inform it of the missing pieces.