Buy a NBD Car to Discourage Car Thieves

When the phone first rang, I thought it was the alarm and felt around for the snooze button. Four a.m. typically finds me sound asleep.

Eyes still closed, I fumbled the receiver off the hook. "Hullo?" I mumbled.

At first, hearing police scanners in the background, I thought it was the news desk at the TV station I was then working for in Denver. A deep male voice asked, "Is this Carol Bogart?" I was now awake. "Yes," I said warily. "This is the Denver Police Department," he informed me. "Do you have a Camaro?"

Damn.

"I don't know," I said. "Do I?"

The last I'd looked, my brand new cream-colored Berlinetta with charcoal trim was parked in the lot behind my high rise – a well-lit lot in a good-neighborhood. I'd parked it and its predecessor there without problems for a couple years.

It was gone.

A band of juvenile thieves had stolen four sports cars that night. Mine was stripped and every single thing in it stolen. These punks had smashed the overhead light so they could dismantle my dash undetected. Then, my low-slung car suffered lots of undercarriage damage during the high speed chase, sailing airborne over every bump in the road, landing again and again in a spray of sparks.

The police came and picked me up to go get it so I could drive it to the dealership for repairs. It sat idling some distance from my apartment. The kid who stole it was in the back of another cruiser as I walked toward my car. When I looked at him, he glared. The police couldn't turn my car off because the steering column had been stripped. Once off, it couldn't be restarted.

The cop had been telling me my Camaro had been in not one, but two, high speed chases. An alert officer had noticed the four teenage thieves lined up at a light around 1 a.m. in these brand new sports cars. They were in the left turn lane – but none had turn signals. This struck him as suspicious.

When he tried to pull them over, the four late model Camaros and TransAms shot through the light and the chase was on. The cop called in backup, and the four were finally pushed to the curb in a residential neighborhood.

The kid driving mine jumped out, ran, circled back, got back behind the wheel, and took off AGAIN!!!! The officer told me he'd had the pedal to the metal. "How did it do?" I asked, trying to keep the pride out of my voice. The cop shot me a wry look.

"Not as good as he hoped," he answered.

Carol Bogart is a freelance writer/editor. Read her articles at www.hubpages.com and her column at www.bloggernews.net. Contact her at 3bogart@sbcglobal.net.