WEST WARWICK — Twenty campaign signs reported stolen over the weekend were returned to Sen. Stephen D. Alves yesterday only a little worse for their wear.

A Coventry man spotted the purloined signs in a Dumpster just over the town line in Coventry, said police Lt. John Malloy.

“It’s unfortunate these things happen,” Malloy said. “We take it pretty seriously when people endorse a candidate and someone else takes it down, regardless of who the candidate is.”

Thieves targeted signs promoting Alves, an eight-term incumbent running endorsed for reelection to his District 9 seat, and Michael J. Pinga, one of his two challengers in a Democratic primary.

“Unless there’s a rash of [thefts], we usually just refer them to the campaign to have it replaced,” Malloy said. “But something like this, we’ll investigate because it’s of a large scale over a large area.”

Alves was in Massachusetts Saturday doing a college tour with his son, William, when he heard from relatives that many of his blue-and-white campaign signs had disappeared overnight. Several of the signs were on lawns along Cleveland Street, Phenix Avenue and Wakefield Street.

“It’s normal to have a few stolen here and there, but I’ve never had a whole section — I mean every single one of them — taken,” Alves said.

Then, yesterday morning, police got a call from Clifford Bramble, of Coventry, who said he’d made an interesting find in a Dumpster behind an unfinished house on Dion Street in his town.

Pinga said he’s also found his signs disappearing in recent weeks, though not on the same scale Alves experienced.

“It’s been a continual thing since we started putting them up,” Pinga said. “I’m probably missing about 20 of them; we’ve put up over 200. … I bought plenty. I expected kids would take a couple here and there.”

Pinga supporter Alan G. Palazzo, of Robin Lane, said he arrived Monday evening to find that someone had thrown eggs at campaign signs on his lawn and a neighboring lawn and at his wife’s 202 BMW parked in the driveway. He phoned the police.

Three hours later, at about 11:30 p.m., Palazzo said, four young people in a car pulled up, took the signs from his lawn — and apparently his neighbor’s lawn — and drove off. He said he jumped into his car and followed them and reported the license plate number to the police by cell phone.

No arrests were made immediately but the signs were returned within a half-hour, Palazzo said.

As for Alves, he said yesterday that most of his signs were back in place. “We’ll see how long they last,” he said.

With staff reports from Lisa Vernon-Sparks

tbuford@projo.com