DRAPER, Utah — It’s been a little over a month since an audio engineer at Thriller Park had his laptop stolen right from his truck parked outside.
Included on that laptop were audio files for the park, and folks have been working overtime to get the park ready in time for the season.
"One day, we worked 21 hours. Just had to get straight back up and start at 11 p.m. the next day, so just a couple of hours of sleep,” said Alex Kuwahara, the owner of Thriller Park.
"Instead of 12-hour days, now we're stuck here working 18-hour days all because these people stole everything we had set up,” said Tyler Smith, a manager at Thriller Park.
Near the end of August, a person was caught on camera going into an employee's truck parked outside here at Thriller Park.
They made off with a laptop that contained thousands of hours of work for Thriller Park's animatronics and shows. Because the laptop still hasn't been recovered, all that work had to be redone.
"We're having to gather and make music together to put our shows back together, and we had to get sounds and create more stuff for our animatronics that we already made before just to get it back working,” said Kuwahara.
Because Kuwahara now needed to sit in an audio booth to help recreate some of those sounds, others working on setting up the park had to pick up the extra pieces.
"They were supposed to be out here helping us get set up. They've been in the studio since February, so not having the help out here set us back big time,” said Smith. “We had to hire more people and work more hours."
But after all those hours and all that extra time, Thriller Park was able to open up on Friday.
"Everybody seems ten times happier, and ten times the effort is paying off," Kuwahara said. "I think it's all worth it, but we're just starting, so we'll see. I think it's going to even be better the more we go at it."
While not all the work has been completely redone, the folks at Thriller Park said they have all they need to finish out this season, which runs until Halloween.