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SANTA FE – The owner of a Santa Fe construction company is offering a $2,500 reward after someone broke into his truck in a bank parking lot and took a cash box containing $38,000 on Friday afternoon.

“That’s just for information leading to an arrest, not a conviction,” said Julian Moreno, who runs Always Construction Services. “I just want to catch the culprits.” He said he fears they will do the same to someone else.

A big part of the missing cash was to cover payroll for his employees. “It breaks my heart that this would happen,” said Moreno. On Monday, he was working on getting a loan to cover pay for his workers.

Moreno said the money was stolen after he went inside the Bank of America branch at 4037 Rodeo Rd. He’d previously been at a nearby Wells Fargo, where he went to cash two checks with that bank from clients and at one point asked a teller to count some of the money he had in the truck. He went out to the truck, but couldn’t get the cash box open, so he just went back inside and got the money from his checks.

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Moreno planned to eventually end up at a credit union to put his money in a safety deposit box. But he first went to the Bank of America branch to cash a BOA check there. When he came out, a window on the truck was smashed and someone had taken the cash box.

“I just went, ‘Please Lord, no, please,’ ” he said.

Moreno said police detectives have described a surveillance video that shows a vehicle pulling into the parking lot, then speedily backing up before the driver pulls up next to Moreno’s truck and does the smash-and-grab.

Moreno said that, at the Wells Fargo, someone may have seen him cashing checks or heard him asking for some cash to be counted, then followed him to the Bank of America.

He said that as he exited the truck at the BOA, he had “an inner feeling” that he should deposit his cash without further ado.

Moreno broke into tears Monday as he described how his mother had offered to get her own loan to cover his losses. “I have the most generous mama in the whole world,” he said. He rejected her offer.

Moreno said he needs cash to pay many of his employees because they have no “I.D.”

“That’s just the way it is,” he said. “That’s just the way it is out there.”

No additional details were available from a Santa Fe police spokesman.

Do you have info?

Anyone with information on the $38,000 theft from Julian Moreno’s truck can call him at 505-577-8503. He is offering $2,500 for information leading to an arrest.