Earlier this month, two thieves broke into TDE house engineer Derek “MixedByAli” Ali's BMW, which was in the parking lot of a Hawthorne, California Equinox.
They got away with a hard drive containing an estimated million dollars worth of TDE music.
One of the thieves, Jonjairo Espinoza (pictured), left his fingerprints on the door of Ali's car. Police were able to track him down and recover the hard drive. Espinoza had stolen from multiple cars in the lot, and he probably had no idea that he had swiped such a valuable collection of likely unreleased music.
“I don’t think he knows what he had,” Hawthorne police Lt. James Royer said of Espinoza, who's facing seven counts of burglary and three counts of grand theft
Police say another copy of the drive is still missing from Ali's car. However, that particular drive is encrypted, so it's unlikely the music will get out.
TDE and Ali haven't revealed which artists were on the hard drive. TDE's roster includes Kendrick Lamar, ScHoolboy Q, J-Rock, Ab-Soul, Isaiah Rashad, and SZA.