People can be so cruel. Or maybe it is just life, the way that when things go bad, the walls can cave in and the roof just flattens you.
I have never written about someone getting their car stolen — until today.
Jeanette Oxelson is 64 years old and is battling breast cancer, diagnosed in November. The walls around her are wobbling, and the roof is creaking loudly.
Like a lot of folks, she is out of work and without health insurance. She had been praying to the good Lord that He keep her healthy long enough to find a job with health benefits.
After discovering the lump, she was placed on a waiting list at Denver Health for a couple of months. The lump was not waiting. So she practically begged a doctor.
She took her right in and got her set up with a charitable group that is paying her medical costs now.
“I started thinking I was going to die,” Oxelson said, finally able to laugh about it, “but ended up in a very good place.”
She underwent surgeries and chemotherapy and radiation treatments, each one lasting at least five hours.
She got to reconnect with her daughter Deanna, 39, who drove her to the treatments and sat knitting with her.
The malignant tumor slowly was eradicated. They began scaling back the chemo to once every three weeks. Oxelson began to feel better.
On the morning of Sept. 26, she felt good enough to dress up and try again to find work as an administrative assistant, work she had done for years.
She grabbed her keys and walked to the parking area just off West 34th Avenue and next to the alley behind her Zuni Street home. Her 1988 Jeep Cherokee was gone.
“Why anyone would want a car that old? That’s the part I don’t get,” she says.
The first thing she did was call the police. She says they were nice, but they told her there wasn’t much they could do.
“I really didn’t expect them to do anything, though I did get a postcard in the mail the other day saying they weren’t going to assign the case to anyone, that they were making it inactive but to tell them if it showed up,” Oxelson said.
She hopes the thief is just a kid who wanted the Jeep for a joyride. But there was no broken glass and she certainly left no key in it, so she figures a professional did the deed.
But why, she wonders?
The Jeep has better than 180,000 miles on it. The radio doesn’t work.
Its most distinguishing feature, she says, “is a great, big, long scratch down the driver’s side left by my girls when they tried to figure out how wide the garage door was.”
The only insurance coverage she carried on the Jeep was liability. The oldest Jeep they still list in the Kelley Blue Book, she said, is valued at only $500.
After 22 years of ownership, she can recite the license plate number: GXH-342. Is there, I ask, anything else she can tell me to help identify the Jeep.
“Yes,” Oxelson said. “On a ledge of the dashboard is a tiny, little blue Smurf with a wrench in his hand that a good friend gave to me over 30 years ago, when the Smurfs were big. It was to look out for the loose nut driving the car.
“Oh, I had all of these plans,” she said, “to get better, go back to work and start doing things again.
“I love that car. I just want it back.”
Bill Johnson writes Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Reach him at 303-954-2763 or wjohnson@denverpost.com.
