TRENTON — Whenever Mark Dunlap looks out the window to his office at the state Motor Vehicle Division on East State Street, less and less of a nearby copper roof remains, he said yesterday.

Dunlap, a Hamilton resident, has worked at the division for 11 years, but over the course of the past year, he’s seen the former Bank of America building at 200 E. State St. slowly succumb to thieves who come out at night — and even sometimes during the day — to pick it apart, he alleges.

“The one day it really took me by surprise. I looked out the window and said, ‘What the (expletive) is that?’ I see a guy crawling around on the roof in the middle of the day,” Dunlap said. “It’s become a joke now because there’s folded chairs and tools left up there.”

Though the value of scrap metals is constantly fluctuating, copper has a current value of approximately $3.16 per pound, about 20 cents down from this time last year, according to several reports.

According to Dunlap, the dismantling started more than a year ago, when the alleged burglars began stealing copper from inside the two-story 15,000-square-foot building and have now made their way to the roof.

“They managed to take every scrap of copper they could get their hands on. The inside is trashed,” he said. “It’s a shame because that building is probably a total loss now.”

Dunlap saw a Richardson Commercial Realtors sign hanging on the building about a year ago and called the number displayed to notify someone of the damage, he said. The realty is located on Route 33 in Hamilton.

“We were the agent on the property, but the owner decided to go in a different direction,” Richardson spokeswoman Beth Thompson said yesterday. “We used to get calls all the time about copper and an air conditioner being stolen, and we forwarded the calls to the owner.”

David Antebi currently owns the East State Street building. When reached via telephone yesterday for comment, Antebi said he is aware of the damage and has reported it to authorities.

“Supposedly there’s not much they can do,” Antebi said. “I’d rather not do a story, if you don’t mind.”

The Trenton Police Department neither confirmed nor denied the allegations of the copper theft when reached for comment yesterday.

Dunlap and some of his coworkers have been documenting the destruction, which has sped up exponentially since last month, by photographing the view from their office windows, he said. They sent e-mails, including photos, to the police department so the incident stays on their radar, Dunlap said.

“I understand in the grand scheme of things this doesn’t rank high on the list when a 9-year-old girl is shot in Trenton, but all you have to do is look up,” Dunlap said.

Dunlap said if he was the building owner, he would “strip the copper off the roof myself and it would have been more than enough to pay for a new roof.”

“Their method of removing is improving,” Dunlap said. “I see clean cuts instead of torn pieces of copper.”

A bill sponsored last year by Sen. Shirley K. Turner (D-Lawrence) sought to regulate scrap metal businesses and require they maintain records and paperwork of all scrap-metal transactions, regardless of weight, for at least 18 months.

Gov. Chris Christie vetoed the bill in September, calling the effort “laudable” in his veto message and saying the law would “impose substantial expenses and administrative burdens.”

The bill would have prohibited businesses from purchasing scrap metal from easily accessible structures such as street signs and air-conditioning units. Scrap yards also will be required to pay customers by check instead of cash and record the license plate number of every vehicle that delivered scrap metal.

Businesses would have been allowed to only accept scrap metal delivered by those traveling by motor vehicles.

According to a National Insurance Crime Bureau report issued this month, there was a 26 percent decrease in 2013 in metal thefts over the level in 2011.

In 2011, a total of 14,676 metal theft claims were processed. The number dropped to 13,603 in 2012 and decreased again in 2013 to 10,807. Between Jan. 1, 2011, and Dec. 31, 2013, 41,138 insurance claims for the theft of copper, bronze, brass or aluminum were handled — 97 percent for copper alone, the report said.

Today's update from @mdunlap1122

Contact Nicole Mulvaney at nmulvaney@njtimes.com.

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