Strange theft

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
21

My stupid sister borrowed my car once when she was living with me and left the keys in the ignition of my car.

The next morning I get up, get ready to go to work and my car was gone. It was stolen from my driveway at my house while I was sleeping.

I could not sleep for weeks knowing that some dickheads around my neighborhood were watching me and my house that closely.

They found the car one day after I got the Insurance money for it. I got more for the car stolen than what I paid for it. I was happy.

22

Once, before I had an alarm installed in my truck, I apparently left the door unlocked one night. Someone noticed, got in, and stole:

two rolls of quarters.

Never mind that there were CDs in the armrest where the quarters were (although, since Andrea Bocelli was on top, maybe they thought I wouldn’t have anything good). The little panel around my radio was dangling, but I guess they couldn’t get it out. And most interesting, my radar detector, a $350 Valentine One, was right there in plain sight, attached to the window. Nope, they just wanted the quarters.

23

I once had a pair of black leather gloves stolen from my car.

I could live with that.

But did the mofo have to break the drivers side window to do it.

Try driving home at 1 in the morning with a busted window, on a cold January night in Minnesota.

The bastiches!

24

Once I left my door unlocked to find that someone had stolen the crappy CD I had hanging from my mirror (this was in like 1986 and I was the first to do it, before the lameo “screws up police radar” rumors started.) It was some crappy public domain classical CD because I didn’t have an actual CD player at the time. They stole the tape out of my tape deck, but not the tape deck/radio (a Krako – why would they? LOL!) but neglected to steal any of my other cassettes or the watch I had on my steering wheel. Talk about lame thefts!
(Handy…my hat is off to you…“Takes the cake” indeed!)

25

This was really strange…

Summer 1992, Athens, Georgia. I come home from class at UGA, and my roommate’s stereo is gone. I thought no big deal at first; he used to take his VCR over to his friend’s place sometimes, so heck, maybe he took the stereo over there. Roommate comes home, and I ask him about it, and he says nope, he didn’t take it. We’ve been robbed! We start looking around, and the answering machine is gone too. Shoot.

THEN it gets weird: We notice that the thieves have LEFT a little duffel bag of stuff in our apartment. We open it up; it contains a Barry White tape, a videotape of some “Soul Train” episodes, a little model car about 6" long, some crappy little china figurines, and a busted Wal-Mart Walkman. I guess they were just out going through houses and figured our stuff was better than what they had already. Surely some of our neighbors had better stuff than what was in that bag, though?

Also, they got a $300 stereo, but left my roommate’s $1500 computer and my $800 guitar.

I got mugged three days after that as well, but that wasn’t as weird; just painful and slightly humiliating.

26

Ahhhhh, sailor…would that we all could experience this kind of table turning. The only times I’ve ever caught someone in the act of stealing something of mine were

  1. Someone was taking my clothes out of a dryer in our apartment complex’s laundry room. Other machines were available, so it wasn’t a matter of someone just needing a dryer…she was trying to take my clothes!
    “Ohh, I saw that your load was finished, so I was just going to fold your clothes for you.”
    Yeah, right.

  2. Co-worker was eating my lunch, a ham sandwich. Now, I don’t pre-make my sandwiches, I bring bread and ham to work and put it in the fridge. I make the sandwich when I’m ready to eat.
    I catch the co-worker with my food as he’s chomping into his freshly made snack.
    Him: “Ohh, is this your lunch? I thought it was mine…”
    Me: “Did you bring ham and bread to work like this?”
    Him: “Uhh, I don’t remember…”
    Me: “So why did you think it was yours if you weren’t sure?”
    Him: “…well, I thought I might have…”
    Me: “So, do you buy ham often?”
    Him: “No.”
    Me: “…and when you do, you bring it in a Zip-Lock bag like this to work?”
    Him: “No.”
    Me: “…so why did you think it was yours?”
    Him: (angrily) “I said I thought I might have!”

Whatever.

I would’ve loved to have seen the expressions on the faces of the punks working on sailor’s buddy’s bike…I’m sure it was priceless…

27

Not a strange theft, but an odd ending: I drove home from work late one night, feeling very sick. I knew I was almost out of gas, but I just wanted to get home and die in privacy, so I didn’t stop for gas.

The next morning my car was gone. I called the police and they put me on hold for 45 minutes. Then they took the report over the phone.

When I went to pick up the report they asked me which one I wanted. Somewhat confused, I told them I wanted both of them. I got the report I’d called in, and another one which was submitted when the car was found. By the timestamps on both of them, it was obvious the car was found while I was on hold.

It was found less than a mile from my apartment, where it had run out of gas. They stole my tools and my speakers.

Since then, I’ve had this image of two guys walking away from the abandoned stolen car, carrying all my tools in the grocery bags I’d left in the car, and one yelling at the other “Next time check the gas before you steal the car!”

28

Years ago, I had a friend who called me and said to come on over, “You won’t believe what happened.” When I asked him what had happened, he said (in a funny voice), “Just come on over.” When I got to his place, I could see a big hole in the side of his car…where his passenger door used to be.
But they left his stereo untouched…

29

I used to have an 86 Chevy Caprice Estate Station Wagon. One day I drove home, (in my other car) and found it parked in the street, with the driver’s door open. The interior light was on, so it couldn’t have been too long. Nothing was missing. I called the cops and told them, but since nothing was missing or broken, nobody much cared, including me.

Somewhat of a letdown compared to the other stories.

30

Great Stories guys, keep 'em coming.

I saw my brother this weekend, and it reminded me of his story. He lived in this house in West Oakland, but would be gone a lot of the time. After his house was broken into for like the umpteenth time, he decides to get proactive. He goes and buys two rottweiler puppies. Do I really need to tell you what happened next? :smiley:

Yep, they were stolen

31

My (ex)boyfriend and I were at the Horde Fest, and at the end of the day he had found a pair of Oakley sunglasses sitting in a completely empty row. He looked around and no one claimed them, so he took them.

A few days later, someone broke the passenger side window to his car, and took ONLY the sunglasses. They didn’t take the cd player, the cds, or anything else. Just the recently-found sunglasses.

Talk about some sort of weird karma.

32

When I was five I shared a room with my baby brother. There was a window at the foot of the my bed and the door was directly opposite the window. During the summer we felt safe leaving the window open for ventilation because it was almost painted shut and you couldn’t open it more that a couple of inches.

One night I woke up because I was cold. I turned over and pulled up the covers while still mostly asleep. The covers didn’t move, which woke me up completely. I looked down to the bottom of my bed and saw a hand reached in through the window holding on to my covers.

I clearly remember my thought process at that moment: “If I scream, I will wake up Tim. If I wake up Tim I will get in trouble.” Obviously I had to find some other way to resolve this situation. So I yanked on the covers as hard as I could and watched The Hand let go and slowly withdraw out the window.

I ran into my parents room and woke Dad up telling him that there was a hand in my window. He told me I was dreaming and to go back to bed. I insisted so he got up to put me back in bed. He walked into my room and his jaw dropped as he saw that my window had been forced all the way open and went to call the police.

We couldn’t see that anything had been stolen so we all went back to bed. The next day we found my cute little blue purse - which had been hanging on my bedpost - hanging on a tree in front of the house. I would dearly love to have seen the guy’s face when he opened my purse to find colored pencils, acorns, and a rubber clown nose.

33

Just a couple weeks ago my brother had his car stolen. He got back to the parking lot and saw that it was gone. He made a few paniced calls to the police and my Mom. Shortly after that he remembered that his phone was still in the car. He called it and a female answered, but hung up almost immediately.

A few days later the police called and his car had been recovered and was stashed in an inpound lot. He went there to get whatever the idiots had left and to see what they took. They had taken all sorts of stuff from the car including his prescription sunglasses. These brainiacs had even tried to pry open the trunk, completely missing the fact that the car had an inside treunk release button. The strangest part of the whole affair was that they had stolen his rather nice cd player from the dashboard. After they had removed his cd player they had installed a crappy old tape player.

My brother also found that one of them had left her ID in the car. :confused:

Last any of us heard they had charged several people in the case, but they aren’t giving us too many details.

34

I’ve had my house robbed: just jewelry and $20 taken out of the back pocket of some jeans I’d left on the bed. Only thing strange about that was the nice consideration the robbers left me: Though I had left a window open, and the robber(s) popped the screen out to gain entry, they very politely closed my window behind them when they left… so as not to leave the cat out(?). Mighty polite robbers…

I’ve also been mugged/purse snatched in a grocery store parking lot at 1 a.m. I had gone in to get change for the laundry machines that night… So the snatcher got $8 in quarters and a bunch of useless credit cards, which were all cancelled by 3 a.m. (before any stores opened). My ATM card was later found in another city – about 250 miles away – at some Mall in Raleigh.

But the *strange[/] one…

Note: I have lived in Florida for about 10 years and have quite the massive seashell collection, scattered about the house & car.

I was living in South Carolina (two years only) and was about to move back to Florida. That very day. The movers had picked up all my big stuff, and I had the car all packed up with what I would need in the next couple days. I had the cat in her carrier, on top of the car, and ran in to lock the door and put the dog on her leash. I was seconds from getting on the road back to the Sunshine State.

I loaded the cat in, loaded the dog in, and turned to get in the car. Neighbor – from across the parking lot – shouts down at me from her balcony. Note she sat on her balcony and watched my entire operation all morning – moving two animals interstate by myself – and nary offered to lift a finger to help (but that’s another thread and a whole other rant). So she shouts, “Is anything missing from your car?”

Heck if I know – everything I own is either on that truck that just pulled out, or else it’s crammed in here somewhere. I scanned the car quickly (wanting to get the A/C on before my furry babies fried in the car) and couldn’t tell if anything was missing. Then, Ms. Informative-but-not-so-helpful-neighbor shouts down at me that she saw some little girl (about 12 – I knew who she meant) looking in my car, and the girl had reached in, picked something up and walked away. I thanked her for the big tipoff, and went on my way. I had to bite my tongue not to say, “And you didn’t shout down to her to stop? You only shout directions at me, but won’t help prevent me from being robbed.”

Yet, another rant and another thread. The next morning, while I was emptying my car, I finally figured out what the little girl stole.

A seashell.

Not just any seashell. Not a pretty one, or a whole one… nope. She “stole” the nasty-ass, cracked, ugly, barnacle-encrusted seashell that I had been using as my ashtray for about a year.

Sheesh, if she’d just asked for one, I’d have given her a nice seashell…

35

Two friends of mine had just moved to Chicago when their car was stolen. They reported it to the police, and about a week later, the cops found it abandoned by the roadside, and returned it. My friends checked the car and saw that all the belongings that were in the car when it was stolen were still there, plus the thieves had left behind a mix tape in the player and a dime bag of pot in the glove compartment.

…

A few summers ago, my now-husband’s car had been broken into, with an obvious (failed) attempt to steal the stereo. A few nights later, he heard noises coming from the detached garage behind the apartment building. He looked outside and saw three teenagers looking into the windows of his car. He ran outside for the following exchange:

Him: “Hey! What are you doing?”
Them: “Uh, we were just looking for Walgreens.”
Him: “Well, you’re not going to find it in my car.”

They ran away and didn’t come back.

36

On the second-to-last day before spring break I stayed after school for about an hour for math league. I decided to stop by my locker to shove all the books I was carrying into its cramped space. I needed to pee so I went into the bathroom. As I was leaving it, I noticed a pair of shoes sitting on top of the trash can. I walked out, but then decided to come back and investigate.

The shoes turned out to be in my size, and were in better condition than the ones I was currently wearing (I typically wear my shoes until they fall apart). Since the halls were deserted this long after school and no one was in sight, I simply swapped my shoes with the ones in the trash. They are much more supportive than my old ones, and I cleaned them up so they look nice, too. However, if anyone at school confronts me about it then I will certainly return them.

37

Mr. Rilch tells this anecdote, and I’m fairly certain it’s true.

Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood was filmed, until last spring of course, in a studio in Pittsburgh. Ol’ Fred drove a sedan, very conservative, not car-thief bait. Nevertheless, he came out of the studio one day to find it missing. The next day, someone gave him a ride back to the studio, and there was his car, where he’d left it, with a note on the passenger seat:

“Sorry, Mr. Rogers; we didn’t know this was YOUR car.”

38

Somebody broke into my grandmother’s house and stole her garbage disposal. I’d found the smashed back door and looked all through the house for something missing, found nothing, and later turned the water on to do some dishes. People freak me out.

39

My brother dressed up as Saddam Hussein one year for Halloween – fake mustache, dark glasses, Arab headdress. Total cost $10 or less. A few days later somebody stole his costume out of my mom’s car, leaving (of course) everything else untouched.

I suppose a Saddam Hussein costume might come in handy if you were planning a robbery or something (not that it would render you inconspicuous, but people probably wouldn’t notice your face as much) … but why risk stealing something you could make at home for a few bucks??

40

Poopah Chalupa, did the guy ever apologize for stealing your lunch or acknowledge it was a scuzzy thing to do? Has anyone else seen him doing this to someone else’s lunch? Maybe you could make yourself an Exlax sandwich and let him scarf that one down. Might teach him a lesson.