Local News in Brief : Electricity Theft Charged

A Carson man faces two felony charges that he stole as much as $2,000 worth of electricity from Southern California Edison Co., which is cracking down on customers who do not pay for power.

Jesse Bean, 27, a refrigerator installer, was charged in South Bay Municipal Court with one count of tampering with electric lines and one count of stealing electricity. If convicted, he faces up to two years in prison.

The utility was tipped to the alleged theft by a call to its hot line, one of several innovations designed to cut the amount of power stolen by customers, said Claude LaBaw, who supervises the utility’s anti-theft department that was expanded this year. The utility also is using a computer program to compare periods of power use for each home and alert the company to sharp decreases.

After it installed a second meter on an electric pole outside Bean’s home, Edison found that a significant amount of power was being lost between the power pole and the house, LaBaw said. When sheriff’s detectives served a search warrant June 23 at Bean’s home, they found connectors used to draw some power from the line before the electricity passed through the meter, Detective John Williams said.