Syracuse, N.Y. — A thief broke into the Glazed & Confused food truck early this morning and took it for a joyride before dumping it in the city’s Inner Harbor.
Paul Valenti, the owner of the popular doughnut shop on Clinton Street, showed up to work this morning to start making the doughnuts. That’s when he noticed the truck missing.
“I just figured someone moved it to the parking lot, but then I saw it wasn’t there,” he said.
An employee who had left the shop at 3 a.m. said he didn’t move the truck. Valenti then called the Syracuse Police Department to see if it had been towed, and officers said it wasn’t on the tow list. That’s when he realized it had been stolen.
Valenti posted a photo of the truck on Twitter and asked for the public’s help in finding the portable doughnut factory. Within five minutes, six customers had called him saying they saw the truck at the corner of Bear and Van Rensselaer streets near the Inner Harbor.
Police found the truck minutes later. The exterior of the truck wasn’t damaged, but the inside was “trashed,” Valenti said at 8:30 a.m., just after having arrived to retrieve the vehicle. No doughnuts were damaged in the heist.
A Syracuse police officer poses next to the Glazed & Confused truck this morning after it was found near the Inner Harbor.
“It’s amazing what power social media has,” he said. “This has to be the quickest case ever solved, thanks to the community.”
Valenti said he would be giving the police officers some doughnuts for their efforts.
Charlie Miller is a journalist with The Post-Standard and syracuse.com. Contact him at (315) 382-1984, or by email at cmiller@syracuse.com.