A Tale of Two Car Thefts (Part 2)

So, at the close of Part 1 of the story, I was running to a nearby house to phone the police, while my husband did a u-turn in the insurance loaner car (a Mercedes) to pursue the car thief driving away in my Jeep Cherokee.

Some nice folks let me use their phone and were wide-eyed by the time I hung up; they could hear everything I was telling the police – that we’d been parked across the street from what we thought was our abandoned Jeep, when the thief strolled up, got into it and drove off with my husband in hot pursuit!

The cops told me to stay put and officers would meet me there. As I waited outside on the street in the freezing cold, I wondered and worried about what was happening with John following the thief. Where was the thief headed? What would John do when he got there? Would there be a phone nearby? (Remember, this was 1995 – hardly anyone had a cell phone in those days).

A squad car with two officers finally arrived and I started to fill them in. To my relief, John pulled up shortly in the Mercedes. He told us he had to abandon the pursuit because the thief had obviously looked in the rear view mirror and noticed a commotion behind him (i.e., me jumping out of the Mercedes which then pulled around behind him) and gunned the Jeep to lose John.

John had stuck with him for several miles through various neighbourhoods, and was very impressed with the performance and handling of the Mercedes 300C! But the thief drove ever faster and more dangerously in his efforts to lose John, so John called it quits figuring it wasn’t worth possibly crashing the loaner Mercedes, or watching our Jeep crash because his pursuit caused the thief to take more risks. The chances were too high someone innocent could be hurt, so John stopped chasing our Jeep and drove back to find me on the street.

Our Jeep had been parked right under a street light, so I had gotten a pretty good look at the thief when he got into our car. I was able to give a thorough and detailed description from his physical appearance right down to clothing (including his jacket and hiking boots with laces).

One of the officers radioed headquarters with my report and the physical description and came back to speak to us with a look of wonderment on his face. He asked if I thought I could I.D. the guy if I saw him and I said absolutely. He said “Then you need to come right down to the the police station, because the guy you described just walked in to headquarters!”

Apparently the thief (a guy named D.H.) had an appointment to be interviewed by the police as he was claiming (falsely, of course) that his welfare cheque had been stolen. The police are onto this type of scam and make it hard for these crooks to simply get a replacement cheque. Hence the interview appointment with a detective that evening.

The plan was to have me nonchalantly walk by the police HQ interview room (which had a large window into the hallway), get a look at this guy, and see if it was my car thief. I took my coat off in an effort to be less recognizable to him, and wandered by as coolly as I could – heart pounding, and resisting the urge to rush screaming into the room and bitch-slap him silly.

Sure enough, it was him. Next, the police told us their plan to catch him red-handed, which would make for an open-and-shut case. They already had a plainclothes officer waiting outside the station who would follow him back to our Jeep (wherever it was parked) and make the arrest when it could be proven he had possession of our car.

Seemed like a good plan, except the plainclothes officer let it go a little too far. The officer let D.H. get behind the wheel and actually get the car started; when the officer flashed his badge and tried to arrest him, D.H. just gunned the Jeep engine and knocked the officer down with our car in his getaway! The injured officer radioed HQ and the manhunt was on.

Several cruisers were now scouring the area looking for him, including one manned by the veteran female detective who had interviewed D.H. earlier about his claim of a stolen welfare cheque. It was this detective who found him a few miles from the police station, pulled over on the side of the road. She parked and approached the Jeep, which D.H. again gunned and knocked her down with our car – putting a second police officer in hospital that night, but not before she radioed the direction he was heading.

He was found and chased by another police cruiser, until he lost control of our Jeep and T-boned a parked car. He jumped out of our Jeep and took off running. The police had staked out his house and caught him a little while later as he climbed over the back fence trying to sneak home.

The wheels of justice were able to run pretty quickly and smoothly on his case as there was no doubt as to what he’d done and no shortage of police witnesses. He pleaded guilty, but we were shocked to find out he got sentenced to only 3 months of jail. Since he’d run down two police officers with a stolen car, I thought he should be going away for much longer!

The next ordeal we faced was dealing with the insurance company. Our car had looked ruined enough to me when I first saw it under the streetlight when he initially got in and drove away. It had since been in a serious crash with a parked car (that car was written off, we heard).

I wanted the insurance company to declare our car “totalled” and to completely write it off and give me a cheque to buy a replacement vehicle. I mean, it was destroyed inside and out – how could they expect me to accept it back? But they did expect this and assured me it could all be fixed, that the car’s value far outstripped the value of the repairs, and it could not be deemed a write-off.

It took well over 2 months for the repairs to be completed. Every time they called us to say the job was done and we could come pick up our Jeep, we’d go by the repair shop and point out something they had failed to see and fix. It was beyond ridiculous. They missed bodywork (paint scratches and dents) that needed repairing; another time I pointed out a deep rip in the sidewall of one of the tires, and at other times our inspections revealed that the headlights and windshield wipers didn’t even work! It got to the point where, when they called us to pick up the car, we’d grill them with “Are you sure, are you r-e-a-l-l-y sure it’s all fixed?”

We got it back on a Friday afternoon in February 1996. Deja vu hit me big time the following Monday when I left work and discovered our parking space was empty. Again.

Part 3 coming soon!

Todo bien. (It’s all good.)

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