Woke up today to find I’m short one Jeep.
Anyone want to commiserate so that I might laugh heartily about this? Grand theft stories welcome.
Sigh.
My condolences. On the bright side, water covers 3/4 of the earth so you don’t have to look there. Really sorry. Paper work filed with the cops, insurance and all other important partys? Good luck.
Actually Booker, when I lived in Grand Junction there are a lot of irrigation canals and a major one was on the top of the hill where my back yard ended. In the two almost three years I lived there they had to pull out two cars.
Car thieves are usually punks with nothing better to do so when the fun is done “let’s watch it sink”.
Sorry bout your Jeep Nym.
On the brighter side I blew my speakers on my computer last night playing some MP3s I downloaded. I can still play the songs but anything with any measure of bass it flutters. That’s okay, these are three years old and I have been wanting to upgrade them since I discovered MP3.
Called the police immediately, gave them description, plates, VIN #, etc. They said my plates weren’t registered to me, so I have to bring bill of sale and title application in before they can even FILE THE REPORT!
I’ve only had this Jeep about a month. I can believe all the paperwork hasn’t been processed, but geeeezzzz…
Apparently it’s not a good karma day for me. Shouldn’ta kicked that grandmother last week.
Sigh again.
Hey, this might cheer you up. I thought my car was stolen last week – but it wasn’t.
I went through the whole rigamarole of filing a police report. Next day I searched around the neighborhood thinking maybe the thieves took a few parts and abandoned it close by.
I found it undamaged a couple of blocks away with a form in the windshield saying that it had been relocated by the NYPD (the day before I noticed it missing) to make room for a parade or movie shoot or something. The police didn’t realize it had been moved cause they copied my license plate # wrong. After a few hours of more rigamarole the “stolen car” alert was lifted from the vehicle so I was free to drive it again.
Despite all the screw-ups by the police, I was delighted to get the car back in the end. Hope you have a happy ending too.
A good friend of mine has his Grand Cherokee stolen. The cops found it in the District a few days later after the teen-age thief drove it into the back of a parked car. Mike contacted his insurance company, which refused to total it (although they could have, for the shape it was in). The only thing the body shop DIDN’T replace was the engine and the back door. A few days after Mike picked it up the engine blew - turns out the shop forgot to fill the radiator :rolleyes:
A brand new car for a $500 deductible 
Poor Nym! (are we related? 
)
I can sympathize, maybe this will make you feel better:
Back when I was living in San Diego thieves seemed to delight in screwing with me and my car (a 5 yo Honda Civic). In the span of three months it was broken into THREE times (each time by smashing a window) and stolen once.
On the plus side, after they stole it I could start it with a screwdriver!
Good luck, I hope it comes back with no damage!
What model Jeep was it? If it’s a real Jeep, people wouldn’t want to steal it (or would be scared to get near it…:D).
Anyway, here’s a 
from a fellow Jeep owner ('84 AMC Grand Wagoneer)
93 Jeep Cherokee Sport. Slightly modified. Great turning radius, good pick-up, drove smooooooth. Plus 25 or so cds and a new cd player in it.
To look on the bright side, I had several bags of stuff to take to the Salvation Army in the back. Guess that’s one errand I don’t have to run.
Is there a smiley for a weak smile?
Well, if you had all that stuff in it maybe that’s why they noticed it? So, did they get any used underwear?
I thought it happened to me once. I woke up & my vw wasn’t there. So after twenty minutes I remembered that I parked it at the store & went back to get it. One time some guy really did take that vw & I called the cops & they had it, it was next to another vw that the same person took. A much better vw, too.
Three years ago my son borrowed my mini van, parked it in the parking lot outside a friends apartment. He spent the evening with his friend, then came out only to find the car gone. The police wouldn’t make out a report that night because they said the lot was private property and we would have to check to see if the owner had it towed. The next day, after checking around and finding that no tow company had taken it, we went to the police station, filled out a form and then had to sit and wait while the officer called around and checked the same places we had already checked. Then he went back and got the officer in charge of stolen car reports and we had to wait while she called around and checked the same places the other officer and we had already checked. Then she took our paperwork, said she would file it, and commented that since our car was take from Hispanic gang territory the probably took it. It was never recovered, I figure it is in Mexico now.
I’m not going to tell my story.
Oct. 31: 1 year anniversary of Tim making a LOT of enemies.
Nov. 5: Tim apologizes to everyone he offended.
–Tim
Whoohoo! Been there, friend. I’ve had four cars stolen, and many break-ins (I remember once the cop taking the report on my swiped stereo and cassettes getting seriously sidetracked on my reggae tapes and discussing reggae bass and counterpoint at a length beyond that to which I could successfully muster - in retrospect I think he was used to dealing with the offended public and was diverting my attention from a pigfuck’s assault on my sanitorium - it worked).
I had a mostly restored '55 Buick Special swiped by (had to be) a tow truck, a '65 Falcon convertible spirited away in the middle of the night (‘twas a fun car, but truly beat - can’t imagine what was on those thieves’ minds), the only car I’ve ever bought new (Chevy Monte Carlo) disappeared from Lola’s one night after ~15 minutes (the lesson was don’t put big fat tires on mag wheels on a GM product). That one was determined to have gone to a chop shop as they found almost half of it, the chop shop derivation being made partially on the basis of the thought that anybody who can roll a car back out on to the street wearing four of those little baby donut spares has a lot of car parts lying around. Thankfully they finally took one that was fully insured.
And my 1975 Plymouth GranFury Police Interceptor (the taxicab that put me through college) actually got stolen twice in one night. It was the first night since I’d had the cab operational that I’d let someone else (a contract driver) use it. Early in the morning he left it at the cab stand at The Dog (Greyhound Bus Station in downtown Austin) to go with another hack to the 7-11 across the lake. As they returned they noticed the cab making it’s way down Congress across the bridge, so they wheeled around and followed it while gettin’ the cops on the Motorola. Seems a drunk had needed a cab and, finding such less a driver, had just driven himself home, so they recovered the cab at his house. About an hour later, my driver got a “special” (wherein the caller specifies the cab he/she wants) that took him way south of town (a “good lick” - i.e., long fare) and the sonofabitch pulled a gun on him and asked for his money. My guy jumped out and ran. He told me later that once he’d put about 25 yards between him and the evil one he wasn’t really worried about being hit. Well, I appreciate what the man on the scene has to say, but his eyes were still saucer-wide when we finally found him later that day. The bastard did let off his magazine at my guy, so he had the will to kill. Sonofabitch.
Anyway, the guy took the cab and drove around for a few hours and abandoned it on a rural road. I got a call early in the morning to come recover it, and skipping a lot of details, I’ll note that when the hordes of cops and lab guys released it to me, there was the better part of an ounce of marijuana spread across the dash. I drove carefully as I pulled away from the impromptu cop convention.
There’s nothing quite like that feeling of, “No, I’m not mistaken, my car was in this spot!”
Condolences from a 1999 Jeep® Cherokee owner and former Willy’s CJ-2A owner.
I hope you get it back. Undamaged. Washed, and with a full tank of petrol.
Several years ago, my grandmother’s Cadillac was stolen. It was stolen from right in front of my house. I woke up, was getting ready for school, looked out the front window, “Mom! Did Grandma go out?” The car had been painted just a few weeks before, and my dad thinks that the guys that painted it made copies of the keys or something(the car was old, and some kind of special edition, and he says it was probably for the parts). My Grandma was really upset. The car was one of the things that reminded her of my Grandfather (who had passed away the year before).
Good luck recovering your car.
Quite a few years ago now, my sister was setting up for a meeting of a group she was working with, and needed to go home to pick up some forgotten stuff. A friend volunteered to drive her, so they headed out and hopped into her friend’s VW bug. They picked up their stuff, got back in the car, and suddenly realized that it was NOT the right one! They went back to the meeting hall through all the back alleys and left the car where they had found it. The right one was parked a little farther down the block.
They called a dealer the next day, and found that the locks came with only a few thousand key patterns. They just hit it lucky, I guess. So did the owner of the wrong car - stolen and returned in half an hour, and probably never even knew it.
As of last week, I’m in the market for a new passenger side window (plus regulator), CDwallet with 50+ CDs, and car stereo. If they had stolen my Eclipse (stereo) it would’ve been covered under their theft-proof warranty. Unfortunately, they only broke it and didn’t steal it.
How’d you rig the razor wire, Tim?
I’ve got an 86 Cherokee that’s been stolen twice. The amazing thing is that we’ve recovered it both times (minus the stereo and baby carseat the first time and plus some front-end damage the second).
The first time was in 1995. We had parked our 10-year-old, rather beat-up, not-at-all-loaded Jeep under a light in the middle of a nice hotel’s parking lot and gone to a company Christmas party. When we came out, we noticed a familiar-looking oil spot, but no car. The idiots had chosen OUR Jeep from a parking lot just chock-full of BETTER Jeeps. We called the cops, talked to security, and found a ride home, dejected. The next morning, the police called to say that it had been found parked in front of someone’s house about two miles from the hotel. Our theory is that they either a) got too cold to drive, since the heater didn’t work and they’d broken a window, or b) gotten scared when they crossed wires getting the stereo out and the dash started to smoke.
The second time, in 1997, it was stolen from the curb in front of our own house. I didn’t even notice at first when I went out. My husband had left for work already and HE hadn’t noticed either. It was gone for two weeks that time; we were in the process of trying to convince the insurance company to at least give us enough money for a down payment on a used car when the police called to say it had been reported by a towing company. They’d towed it from a motel parking lot on the west side of town and it looked like someone had been living in it for a while. The thieves probably just wanted to go joyriding, since it also looked like it had been buried up to the axle in mud. What really frustrated me about this was that the towing company had had the car for a full week before they reported it. They do that so they can charge you for storage, and it’s perfectly legal. Of course, after it’s been sitting a week in the rain with a broken-out window, it’s a LITTLE worse for the wear and there’s no hope of getting fingerprints, but that’s no skin off their nose. But I’m not bitter.
This is in addition to the four breakins we’ve had where they’ve taken things FROM the cars without stealing the actual vehicles. They did, however, break open the steering column on our Toyota trying to steal it, doing about $900 worth of damage in order to net one $45 stereo. I must say, Jeep could really learn a lesson from Toyota when it comes to steering column design. I can now, given a pointed screwdriver, steal a Jeep just as well as the next hoodlum - all you have to do is pop the plastic top of the steering column off ($800 to replace new, about $450 used) and push a lever, and you’re on your way! We now park the Jeep in front of the other car (the one with the alarm) in the driveway and we put a Club on both steering wheels.
With the net & carfax.com, etc, you can look & see where your car may be. You just input the vin number on some web sites & you can see if anyone ever sells it, I think.
My Jeep has a steel column, steel shifter ring, steel dash, steel body…It’d be a bitch to steal. Not that any 17-year old car theif would know it’s a Jeep ('84 Grand Wagoneer, stopped production in '91, and mine has all the emblems removed)