BY ALLISON LEVITSKY
Daily Post Staff Writer
Police are scratching their heads after discovering what sounds like a dystopian hate crime against robots: a torched ATM found at Google’s Mountain View headquarters early yesterday (Jan. 2) morning.
The standalone ATM was found around 4:30 a.m. on the 1900 block of Charleston Road, south of Amphitheater Parkway, police said.
While police were working to determine where it had come from, an employee at Michael’s at Shoreline, located 2 miles away at 2960 N. Shoreline Blvd., called to report that the restaurant’s ATM was missing from the front lobby.
Police responded to Michael’s and saw that its glass front doors had shattered and the wood surrounding the doors had splintered and been strewn about the floor, police said.
A flatbed work truck found blocks from the restaurant was believed to have been used to smash into the restaurant, police said. It was determined to have been stolen out of Cupertino.
Police didn’t find any suspects in the area, and said yesterday afternoon that they didn’t know how the ATM made it from the restaurant to the Google campus or why it was set on fire.
It wasn’t the first time a standalone ATM machine was stolen in that part of Mountain View. At 1:40 a.m. on Dec. 27, 2009, surveillance video captured the images of a man and woman carrying away an ATM from a deli at 2860 Bayshore Parkway. About 11 hours later, a witness told police she saw three women in a black pickup truck dumping the ATM in some bushes in the 1000 block of Alta Avenue. The thieves weren’t able to get any money out of the machine.