BANDERA -- Sunday was the first full day without rain in Bandera.
Employees of Bandera County Emergency Management told KENS 5 that residents in Bandera County are still stuck in their homes, waiting for high waters to recede.
As volunteers help clean up what the floods left behind, they're noticing a trend: looters targeting homes and RVs.
Sunday, as Team Rubicon helped clean up homes off Chipman Lane, a resident told KENS 5 she returned to her home the day after the floods, and noticed her 200-pound steel safe was missing. It contained memorabilia of her late husband, and family treasures that can't be replaced.
Trucks with trailers left mangled in trees off Highway 16 also were targeted. Jeremiah Trombly, the District Coordinator of Team Rubicon, says a flat screen TV went missing from one of the vehicles.
Tuesday afternoon, we spoke with another family whose trailer was the target of criminals. The Kothmann Family's trailer washed away in the floods from Pionner RV Resort, and ended up wedged underneath another trailer half a mile down river.
"It was the only thing my family had and the only vacation that my boys had. It was there little home, their little fort, their home away from home. It's just a bad way to start summer," said Conrad Kothmann.
Before the storm hit Bandera two Saturdays ago, Koffmann was at Bandera Park with his family celebrating his son's 7th birthday.
"I had seen the cells building from Hondo and one cell stayed down there, but another cell branched off of it and was coming up about 7 o'clock," he said.
The family decided to leave the trailer at the RV park and sleep at their home in Bandera for the night.
"It just kept coming and coming and coming," said Kothmann. "Probably about 12:30, I turned over and I told [my wife] Beck, 'I don't think we have a trailer anymore.'"
Wednesday, a friend told the Kothmanns to look down river for their trailer that disappeared from the RV park. A resident spotted birthday presents scattered outside.
"By the time I had gotten that phone call to come down here, everything that was still visible was gone," said Kothmann. "All the toys were gone. There was nothing left lying outside the RV."
Kothmann snapped photos of the inside of the trailer. Days later, he noticed the skylight vents, the TV and fire extinguisher were missing. Even the new fireplace he bought was broken from someone trying to pull it out.
"They even took the pins from the landing gear that they could get a hold of. The one landing gear was broken, but the other one they took the pins off of," he said. "They took little minuscule items like that. And I'm just like, 'Who does that? Who takes that?'"
Kothmann tells us when the family was working to clean up next to the river where the trailer landed, they spotted suspicious individuals lurking around their trailer they just moved to street level.
"When we were trying to pick up the debris field, we actually had teenage kids up here that I had to run off while I was picking up the debris," said Kothmann.
Team Rubicon, volunteers made up of veterans, first responders and community members, helped the Kothmann Family clean up the mess.
What would probably take several hours for the Kothmann Family to do themselves, Team Rubicon's help shortened the workload to just an hour and a half.
"It is an unfortunate recurrence disaster after disaster," said Trombly. "The moment the houses empty out or RVs empty out, people show up and they try to take advantage of it."
Team Rubicon had up to 75 volunteers working to help cleanup the food damage during their time in Bandera County.
"We actually had over 40 people show up over the weekend with less than 24 hours notice," said Trombly. "In a town as small as this, that's a really high number. We were able to take care of most of the need in just a matter of four days."
For the Kothmann Family, it's much more than a trailer. They saved two years to pay cash for a second home carelessly ravaged by the floods and looters.
"I just keep going back to that. Who does this? What was so important from this trailer that you had to steal from a family that lost everything? And the stuff I was trying to reclaim that was still useful is now gone," said Kothmann.
Bandera county also filed a disaster declaration, and received word that Governor Abbott included Bandera County in the state's disaster declaration.
If you live in Bandera County, and you need to be included in the assessment, call Bandera County Emergency management at 830-460-8299.
