As a boy in El Salvador, Jose Lozano would play with toy trucks and tell a picture of his dead father that one day he would own a real truck.

Decades later in the United States, Lozano’s dream came true when he bought a dump truck and started his own hauling business in 2006.

Last month, however, the dream turned into a nightmare when Lozano’s truck was stolen from the Columbia street where he kept it parked.

“I don’t have a life now,” Lozano, 33, said last week. “I’ve got to start all over again.”

He said his plight is made worse by the fact that he has a 10-month-old son to support.

A police spokeswoman confirmed that the 1995 Kenwood dump truck was stolen Oct. 18 between 1:30 a.m. and 2 p.m. from Gerwig Lane, near Lozano’s Columbia house.

Lozano said he left war-torn El Salvador (his father was killed in the nation’s civil war) when he was 12, running across the border from Mexico in 1990 while being pursued by border patrol agents. The friend who was looking after him was nabbed, but Lozano kept running.
 
“I was only 12 years old and I had no idea where I was going, I just ran,” he said. “I ran for 45 minutes. Someone just grabbed me and threw me in bushes and told me, ‘Wait here.’ ”

Eventually, Lozano made it to Los Angeles, where he was taken in by a relative, enrolled in school and learned to speak English. One day in Santa Anita, Calif., he saw a dump truck and his childhood dream was rekindled.

“I want to own one of those. and I want to marry an American girl,” he recalled saying to a person he was with at the time.
 
Lozano eventually gained permanent resident status and married an American woman. In 2004, he moved to Columbia and began pursuing his other dream.

He secured a business loan for $88,000 and went to Texas, where he found a tractor-trailer. He had it refitted as a dump truck, brought it back to Maryland and, in 2006, began hauling rock and dirt from construction sites. He named his business Lozano’s Dump Trucking.

When he told his mother in El Salvador that he had bought his own truck, she cried, and, according to Lozano, told him, “Dreams do come true.’ ”
 
Lozano agreed. “This country opens the door to you in a lot of ways,” he said. “If you don’t see that opening coming to you and you don’t jump, you’re going to miss.”
John Trout, a dispatch manager at Jerry Preston Hauling, in Harford County, who contracted work to Lozano, described Lozano as a willing worker and said the lost truck was a bad break for a nice guy.

“There’s a ton of (haulers) out there who aren’t half what he is,” Trout said. “I’d use him before just about anybody else.”

Trout said he had been contracting work to Lozano for three years.

“He kind of kept asking if we had anything. He’s very persistent. He did a good job,” Trout said.
 
Lozano’s company had no other employees. He was about a year away from paying off his dump truck, he said.

Now, Lozano is battling insurance companies to recoup the money he lost on the truck, he said.

“I always thought maybe they were going to take a tire or two, but I never thought they would take the whole truck,” he said. “I never thought it was going to happen to me.”

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