Valuable items stolen at storage units

By DAVE CALDWELL, Staff Writer dcaldwell@minotdailynews.com
A burglary at a storage unit business in north Minot that apparently occurred in the overnight hours Sunday night and early Monday morning left several renters in search of their missing property. But not only did these thieves make off with items worth a great deal of money, they made off with a portion of a Minot man’s life.


Dave Wiley of Minot had a rare drum kit in a storage unit at Magic City Moving and Storage, located in the 100 block of 34th Avenue Northeast. In all, nine units had the locks cut off.


“It’s a top of the line Yamaha Birch Custom Absolute,” Wiley said Wednesday. “It’s a special line they made for recording artists. The thing that made it so special is that it has a vintage natural finish that actually changes color as it ages.”


Wiley has been a professional drummer for many years, and his kit is something he accumulated over time rather than purchased all at once, making it as much a sentimental loss as a monetary one.


“You pick things up here and there as you go along,” he said. “That represents 28 years of my life and travels all over the world.”


Also gone are a variety of Zildjian and Paiste cymbals, some of which Wiley picked up in places such as Turkey and Switzerland, he said.


“The thing that really just sickens me is that it hadn’t been up there 10 days,” he said. Wiley said an illness in the family forced the selling of the house where he had been storing the kit.


“It had a big old military lock on it,” he said. “Whoever went through that unit was only looking for big-ticket items. They passed up Xboxes and other stuff in favor of generators, the drum kit and other extremely valuable items.


“It was a seek-and-destroy mission,” Wiley said. “Whoever did it knew what they were doing. They got in and got out, and they obviously had to have a truck and/or trailer, because a lot of that stuff is pretty heavy.”


Wiley said Wednesday he is still trying to put a price tag on his equipment, but that it is tough to do because he bought most of it on endorsement deals, usually around 70 percent off. He said he was up to around $12,000 that he paid for it, and he still had more pieces to go.


The Ward County Sheriff’s Department is also investigating burglary reports from a nearby storage company just outside city limits.


Units in the 10 block of 45th Avenue Northwest, less than a mile away, were reported Monday and Tuesday evenings as having been burglarized. One man reported the theft of more than $1,200 in military and civilian items.