Brothers steal bridge, sell it to scrap metal dealer (VIDEO)

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The World

The Jones brothers really did have a bridge to sell you.

Two brothers have been charged with stealing a 50-foot-long by 20-foot-wide bridge in a sleepy area of Western Pennsylvania about 60 miles north of Pittsburgh, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reports.

Coverts Crossing Bridge was built in North Beaver Township in 1887 and was worth an estimated $100,000, according to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

Nearby businesses only infrequently use the bridge, and no one from New Castle Development, the company that owns it, had driven across it in the last month, according to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. A neighbor noticed it was missing in early October and alerted the company.

"I couldn't believe it," Gary Bruce, a spokesman for New Castle Development, told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, adding that dismantling the bridge would have been "a lot of work."

Benjamin Arthur Jones, 24, and Alexander Williams Jones, 25, of New Castle, Pa., used a blowtorch to break up the bridge, police told The Associated Press. They sold their 15 1/2 ton haul of scrap metal to a recycler for $5,000.

An employee from the recycling company contacted the police after Alexander Jones showed him photos of the bridge on his cellphone, the AP reports.

The Jones brothers have been charged with criminal mischief, theft, receiving stolen property and conspiracy, the AP reports.

Before Coverts Crossing Bridge vanished, residents claimed it was haunted by the ghosts of people who’d died in accidents on it, as described in a video produced by the Lawrence County Historical Society.

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