BRECKENRIDGE, Colo.—There’s an unusual rash of car thefts in Summit County—people who steal cars but leave them a few miles away unscathed.
It’s a type of crime called “car borrowing.” And police in Summit County say that over the last two years, a full third of cars reported stolen turn up a short distance away.
The victims of car borrowing concede they’re very lucky. Take 16-year-old Kyla Gray for example.
Gray recently found that her car wasn’t where she had parked it in front of her house in Breckenridge the night before. At first she thought her father was playing a joke on her.
“I kept thinking that my dad was trying to teach me a lesson because I left the keys in it,” she said. “It never really crossed my mind that something was going to happen.”
Gray didn’t see anything wrong with leaving the keys in her 1994 Ford Bronco. But when she realized it had been stolen, her thoughts quickly turned to the items she had left in the front seat.
“I was really freaked out because I remembered that my wallet and some checks were left in the front seat,” Gray told the Summit Daily News. “If someone saw the keys in it, then they definitely saw the wallet, as well.”
After calling police, Gray got a call from a friend who saw the vehicle parked in a driveway some 4 miles away.
Officers from the Breckenridge Police Department found the Bronco parked in front of an unoccupied home. There was no obvious damage to the vehicle, and the wallet, checks and money were still on the seat where they had been left.
“Someone just drove it a couple of miles and then ditched it,” said Kayla’s father, Dr. David Gray.
Cases like Gray’s have left authorities handing out some old-fashioned advice: Don’t leave keys and valuables in an unlocked car.
“These kinds of things are truly preventable, but they still keep happening,” Summit County Sheriff John Minor said.
In the past two years, the Summit County Sheriff’s Office has received 31 stolen vehicle reports, and in nearly one-third of those cases, the keys had been left in unlocked vehicles.
Officials suspect that many of the car borrowers just use the stolen vehicles for a single ride.
“A few simple steps can really prevent a lot of headaches,” Minor said. “These are crimes of opportunity, pure and simple.”
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Information from: Summit Daily News,
