I’ve heard of selling a bridge, but stealing one is new.

An old joke used to imply someone is extremely gullible is saying “if you believe that, then I’ve got a bridge to sell you.” It’s a reference to George C. Parker, a 1900s-era American con man who successfully duped a not-insignificant amount of people into “buying” the Brooklyn Bridge from him. Obviously, you can’t buy an installed bridge from someone. If, however, they were able to steal the bridge in its entirety, well, that’d be a different matter.

Recently, residents of Akron, Ohio who took a walk in Middlebury Run Park discovered that the park’s 58-foot bridge had gone missing. Yes, all 58 feet of it. The bridge had previously been removed from its moorings over the Little Cuyahoga River and was sitting in an open field. It was removed as part of a wetlands restoration project, and was going to be repurposed elsewhere, but the whole thing has up and disappeared.

According to investigators from the Akron PD, the bridge is made of polymer composite parts, so theoretically, it wouldn’t be that hard to disassemble. “The bridge is almost all polymer I’m told and really just connected by some bolts, so if you have any equipment, sockets or anything of that nature, it wouldn’t have been very difficult at all to start the process of disassembling that,” Lt. Mike Miller told WJW-TV.

Thieves steal 58-foot bridge from Ohio park https://t.co/wzprONFXr6

— Columbus Dispatch (@DispatchAlerts) December 16, 2021

The police are working under the assumption that the bridge, either in its completed form or components, will be used elsewhere by the thief, since its parts don’t have much in the way of recycling value. “It could be used for a variety of different things to include as simple as landscaping or they could use it for some other engineering project, some other large scale project,” Miller said.

The search for the bridge is still ongoing as of writing.