Tarkblog

I took at picture for you this morning:

This is where I normally park my car. In fact, it’s where I had my car parked until about 6:45 this morning, until we noticed it wasn’t there anymore.

Our morning was a typical one. We get up about 5, leave about 5:10 or so to go to the gym where we stay for an hour and come home. We got back from the gym about 6:30. The wife starts taking her shower and I grab breakfast and head up to check my e-mail. When she gets done with her shower, I realize I need to use the restroom so I go downstairs to use the half bath on the first floor. While in there I hear a noise in the adjacent kitchen. I figure it’s the wife getting breakfast, no problem. THen I hear the floor above me creaking a bit, and I realize that the wife actually was still upstairs. So next I think it’s the cat messing around up on the counter. No big deal.

I finish my business and head back upstairs to get ready to take my shower. I notice the cat is sitting on the bed, which was odd I guess, but I still didn’t think anything of it.

The wife kisses me goodbye, and she’s off. I’m still doing my normal morning email check routine and whatnot. She comes back upstairs a few minutes later frustrated because she can’t find her keys. So I go downstairs to help her. We look all over and I finally tell her to just grab the spare set and we’ll find hers later. We look on the key hook, and the spares are missing as well. As are the house keys. Dammit. I can see from my vantage point that her car is still in the garage, so I told her to check if mine if still there. It wasn’t.

So we buttoned up the house and I called 911. I reported the information, and she let me go. It took what seemed like forever for the police to show up. I actually called back again and the guy I spoke with told me that they were “really busy” this morning so it may be a few minutes. I wasn’t in a hurry to report the car to the police officer; I wanted someone to come and make sure that some prowler wasn’t still around the house with some form of gunnage. We had no way to get out really; my car was missing the wife’s keys were all gone.

The officer finally shows up and we start going into details about what happened and the analysis of what’s going on. We tell him the story and he starts his report.

Now, for those of you who don’t know or remember, my car is a 2004 Pontiac GTO. There are not a lot of them floating about in the US, let alone in my hometown. To top that off, my car is bright yellow. I didn’t choose the color to be pompous, it was the only choice I had when I went to buy the car. However, I can tell you that a smart car thief would never steal my car on the account of the fact that it’s pretty recognizable. Add to it the fact that I have license plates from my alma-mater and not regular state plates makes it pretty unique for the state. There are only two registered yellow 2004 GTOs in the county (I found this out when the detective showed up this morning. He says “A yellow GTO? It’s either Robert Stackman’s or it’s that one with the college plates on it” ).

So while we are recounting our morning, they put out an alert to be on the lookout for this highly noticable car.

What we pieced together is this: the police were looking for 3 suspects this morning in this area (they wouldn’t tell us why they were looking for them). They found the suspected abandoned red truck about 6 blocks away from here, out of gas. Most likely these guys wanted out of this area and the wandered into our alley and found my car. We had just gotten back from the gym, so our lights were on in the house. The garage door was up, so you could easily walk into our house after opening the door between the garage and the breezeway. They did. They came into our kitchen and grabbed the wife’s keys off the counter, the two sets of keys off the key rings, and my set of keys which was on the other side of the kitchen in a basket. They didn’t take anything else; my wallet sitting right next to the keys was still there. As was my cell phone.

The officer went outside to take some pictures and in the course of that he found the wife’s keys sitting out by the garbage cans on the ground. I looked some more and found that the extra keys I keep in my car (extra keys meaning some old work keys, keys to our other house, etc) had been thrown on the ground inside of our garage. My keys were still obviously missing (they were attached ot the car) as was the wife’s spare set. He made us leave them until the detective showed up in case they could get prints off of them.

When I gave the detective my insurance information, he told me that the VIN# on my insurance card was not a valid number. Great. So I gave him my DOB + SSN + address so they could look it up in the computer system. It came back that I didn’t have any car registered to me. Fantastic. I know they just did a huge BMV computer system upgrade so I didn’t hold much creedence to that. But my registration was obviously in my glove compartment, so I didn’t have any proof that I owned the car. The lease information is in our safe, and I’m not sure where the combination is at the moment. He said it’s pretty common to transpose VIN#s and he didn’t hold a lot of accountability to the BMV computer system either, so he said not to worry. But I don’t remember my plate number, so I couldn’t help him there.

In the meantime, he got a dispatch from a neighboring county that they were in pursuit of a yellow GTO with college plates.

So after giving my information, a taped statement, talking with the detective, and phoning the insurance company now I wait. The last word I got was that the vehicle had been stopped and suspects had fled. There was no update on the condition of the vehicle nor if they apprehended the suspects or not. But certainly they would have been a lot better off stealing the wife’s bronze Grand Prix than a yellow GTO. Dumbasses.

I will give more updates when they become available. I don’t care about the condition of my car a bit, but if someone else ever enters my house like that again, and I catch them, I’m hoping for their sake they are ready for what’s coming next.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 11th, 2007 at 9:12 am and is filed under Random Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.