I know this guy. He’s a bigwig chief medical officer for a company. He’s also a cycling fanatic (a detail whose inclusion will make sense in a minute). The guy sent me an email about an experience he had yesterday with some car thieves and the Dallas Police Department. I asked him if I could share it, because it made me a little crazy. Without further ado:
“I was at the gym lifting (leg day of course) at Texas Family Fitness on Mockingbird and Abrams. It was my lunch break, and I’d been inside almost exactly an hour. I came out from the gym at 12:05 p.m., and someone had stolen my Cadillac Escalade. I have an AirTag in it, and when it pulled up on the Apple app, the AirTag said it was in a parking lot in North Oak Cliff, 418 N. Lancaster to be precise.
“I called the police thinking they might be interested in catching a car thief or possibly some people running a chop shop, but the 911 operator said the police were unwilling to do anything. The 911 operator said she’d give my phone number to someone on duty who would call me so I could file a report. I tried to explain that my car had just been stolen and if they went right now they could possibly catch the car thief. But there was no interest. She said I’d have to file a police report before the police would send someone to investigate.
“So I called my wife to pick me up and we drove down to the address and we found my SUV parked behind a big dumpster. The apartment complex had boarded-up windows and half the front doors were open. I still had the keys because they had hotwired my car to steal it. I ran across the parking lot expecting someone to come running out of one of the open doors and jumped in my car to drive it off. But apparently the thieves had pulled out some fuses, probably to shut the car alarm off, and it wouldn’t start.
“I called the police again and said, ‘I’ve found my car. Can you send an officer so that when I call a tow truck we can safely get my car?’ The 911 operator was less than helpful as she explained that I hadn’t filed a police report yet so how could they send an officer? She said if I felt unsafe, it was my choice to leave. Finally she said they’d send someone out in a couple of hours.
“Instead of waiting for who knows how many hours, I called AAA, and in less than 15 minutes, a tow truck driver named Jerry showed up. I told him about my stolen car and that the police might provide some protection when and if they ever showed up. He laughed and checked my insurance card against the VIN and since I had the keys, he said he didn’t need to ‘wait for no police officer.’ He hooked my Cadillac up and eased it out from behind the dumpster and onto his truck and towed it to a repair shop. He said my SUV was easily 2-3 hours from hitting a chop shop. They’d already yanked my front and rear license plates and put fake paper plates on that even identified in small print that the car was a Cadillac Escalade. (Nice touch. Think they have a file folder full of fake paper plates with all the makes and models that are most popular for chop shops?)
“While the Dallas PD has the opportunity to stake my car out for an hour or two and arrest the chop shop folks or possibly the car thief, I recovered the car on my own.
“Amazing thing is that after I got home around 2:30 p.m., someone called me and said they had my wallet, driver’s license, and all my credit cards. The thieves took $90 in cash but left everything else.”
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