A BNSF train near Amboy was stripped by a convoy of up to 20 vehicles on September 5. Investigators recovered one truck. The other nineteen are still out there.

Around 9:45 p.m. on Friday, September 5, Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railway investigators notified San Bernardino County Sheriff’s deputies that a train had been robbed near the unincorporated desert community of Amboy, California. The convoy that hit it numbered somewhere between 15 and 20 vehicles. The cargo was Ariat boots and DeWalt construction equipment, valued at approximately $50,000. One truck got caught. The rest drove into the night, and as of this writing, investigators are still looking for nearly 19 of them.

That is not a heist. That is a fleet operation. The Amboy job required pre-positioning a convoy across a stretch of open Mojave desert, coordinating the load-out from a moving or stopped train, distributing cargo across multiple vehicles to limit exposure on any single stop, and then dispersing. The sheriff’s department’s own statement described the organizations behind these thefts as “highly controlled criminal syndicates working together to quickly disable trains, remove cargo from containers, then transport stolen property to various locations.” What happened near Amboy on September 5 is what that looks like in the field.

About 55 minutes after BNSF investigators made the call, off-duty Morongo Basin Station MET Deputy C. Ranslem was driving home westbound on Twentynine Palms Highway when he spotted a white box truck occupied by three men, matching both the description and the direction of travel relayed to deputies. He didn’t stop the truck himself. He notified on-duty personnel, gave the vehicle’s location and direction, and let the system work. Deputy S. Tokar conducted the traffic stop near Cholla Avenue. Two occupants bailed immediately on foot. A third stayed with the truck and was detained with assistance from the California Highway Patrol. A sheriff’s helicopter located one of the fleeing suspects hiding in a bush just north of the stop point. The second runner was also found. The third occupant remains unidentified as of this report, according to the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department.

Eddiel Burgos, 30, and Pastor Pena Lerma, 43, were booked into Morongo Basin Jail on suspicion of commercial burglary and grand theft of cargo valued at over $950. The Sheriff’s Department lists both as residents of Sinaloa, Mexico. Both were released after posting bail on Sunday. As of Tuesday afternoon, the district attorney’s office had not filed formal charges against either man. Every allegation in this piece flows from the charging documents and the sheriff’s department’s public statements. Burgos and Pena Lerma are presumed innocent of any crime a court has not found.

The charge they’re facing, grand theft of cargo valued at over $950, is California Penal Code Section 487h. That statute specifically covers theft from a trailer, a railcar, or a shipping container. It’s the rail-specific hook that gets you past the baseline grand theft threshold and into cargo-crime territory, which matters because cargo crimes carry different evidentiary and investigative implications, and because federal task forces like the CHP’s Cargo Theft Interdiction Program, established in 1993, use that charge classification to trigger their involvement. Whether the DA files on 487h, files on something else, or files at all, is an open question this report can’t resolve.

What the Amboy case is not is unusual. The San Bernardino County desert corridor, the stretch of BNSF track running east from the Cajon Pass through Devore, Barstow, Daggett, Ludlow, and out to Amboy and beyond, has been worked hard by organized theft crews all summer. In August 2026, sheriff’s deputies assisted BNSF Railway police in a Devore train burglary, an incident that escalated on August 10 when a suspect allegedly fired a handgun at a BNSF police officer during the burglary, according to KESQ. Police ultimately arrested five men in that case. On August 22, investigators found an abandoned vehicle loaded with Brooks running shoes worth $123,000, stolen from a rail car, with no suspects in custody. On August 17, deputies came across a van carrying $28,000 worth of Lego sets removed from a rail car. Four people connected to that recovery were released without charges, according to the San Bernardino County Sentinel. On September 1, roughly 30 people swarmed a BNSF boxcar in Helendale, along National Trails Highway, offloading Brooks running shoes with an estimated retail value of $57,000. One man was arrested. Twenty-nine walked.

The crews are hitting isolated stretches of the BNSF desert corridor, away from urban camera coverage and with limited law enforcement density. The tactic, boarding slow-moving trains or cutting air brake hoses to force an emergency stop, loading merchandise into waiting vehicles and dispersing, is documented by the Los Angeles Times in its reporting on the broader Southern California rail theft environment. An assistant chief of police at BNSF who oversees Southern California operations, Rich Daniel, told industry professionals at a cargo theft conference in Monrovia last year that more sophisticated gangs sabotage tracks or cut brake lines specifically to strand trains in remote locations where they’re easier to work, because that lets the crew stop the train where they want it. Amboy is about as remote as the BNSF California system gets. The nearest sizable community is Twentynine Palms, roughly 40 miles to the southwest. A 15-to-20-vehicle convoy can operate out there for a meaningful stretch of time before anyone calls it in.

For context, the national rail theft total is $200 million in goods taken from more than 75,000 theft incidents on U.S. freight rail networks in 2025, according to the Association of American Railroads, whose members include BNSF, CSX, and Union Pacific. That’s roughly double the 2024 figure, which the AAR put at more than $100 million across an estimated 65,000-plus incidents, itself a 40 percent increase over the prior year. No more than one in ten theft attempts results in an arrest, the industry group has said, and many of those arrested are repeat offenders. One railroad has reported arresting the same individual 17 times. California sits at the center of this. The state logged 1,218 cargo theft incidents in 2025, the most of any state in the country, even as Los Angeles County saw an 11 percent drop, according to Verisk CargoNet analysis. The activity is moving inland: Kern County jumped 82 percent, and San Bernardino County’s outlying transit corridors are absorbing the displacement. The Inland Empire was already the top-ranked risk corridor nationally in Q1 2026, accounting for 36 percent of all reported cargo theft incidents in the country in that quarter.

California investigators have tied the rail theft activity explicitly to transnational criminal organizations. Rich Daniel, the BNSF assistant police chief for Southern California operations, told the Monrovia conference that as border enforcement tightened under the current administration and human smuggling became harder, the same syndicates shifted resources into train robberies. The cartels, he said, sometimes compel trafficking victims already inside the U.S. to work off their debts by participating in the heists. The two men arrested near Cholla Avenue on September 5 are listed as Sinaloa residents. That is what the public record shows. It doesn’t establish cartel connection, organizational affiliation, or anything beyond residency and the allegations in the charging documents. Write it as the record shows it, not as inference.

The Amboy job, in isolation, looks like a partial win. An off-duty deputy going home caught one truck, recovered a load of boots and tools, and put two men in a county jail. That’s real. The sheriff’s department is right to recognize Deputy Ranslem’s situational awareness, and the handoff to on-duty personnel was textbook. Nothing about what Ranslem did was complicated, and that’s exactly why it worked. He saw the truck, he called it in, and he didn’t let it go. In a desert corridor where most of the road traffic at 10:40 p.m. is legitimate, a white box truck moving in the same direction as a just-reported train heist isn’t invisible if someone is paying attention. Someone was.

One truck recovered out of a 15-to-20-vehicle convoy means somewhere between 14 and 19 vehicles reached their destination. The cargo in those trucks, whatever wasn’t in the one Ranslem spotted, is distributed. The people who drove those trucks are not in custody. The investigation is ongoing, and the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department is asking anyone with information about the Amboy theft to call 760-366-4175. Callers who want to stay anonymous can text “REPORT” to (844) 909-3006 or submit a tip at the sheriff’s department’s We-Tip portal. If you saw a convoy of white box trucks moving westbound through the Mojave on the night of September 5, that tip line is open.