Bad Monday!
Posted: Tue Jun 16, 2015 9:31 pm
Ok, this story has a little LEO contact and a little blooper in it. May be a little wordy but I think the whole story needs to be told.
I work in management for a specialized construction company, at around 4:30pm on Monday I received a call from one of my employees that he had pulled up to his house and started taking groceries inside and the next thing he knows the truck is taking off down the alley. Yes he had left the keys laying on the seat. I tell him to report it to the police and tell him I don’t think we have full coverage on the truck so it is probably just a loss and we will not see it again. A couple of hours later the driver remembers we have GPS on this truck, so I log in and locate the truck. Okay, this is where the story starts to sound like the Keystone cops, I call the county sheriff where the truck was reported stolen and the dispatcher immediately puts me on hold, and I throw on some shoes and grab my gun and wife in that order and head to the town the truck is in about 20 miles away. I end up being on hold for around 7 to 8 minutes and the phone starts ringing again, then goes to voice mail. I hang up and call back and dispatcher tries to put me on hold again, I tell the story about the truck being reported stolen and we have it on GPS location and I need to meet a deputy and the dispatcher puts me on hold any way. In the meantime I use my wife’s phone to call a fellow employee that lives close to the area that the truck is located in and ask him if he know which county it is in because I am not getting any help from the reporting county (can’t even get them on the phone). He tells me the area is in the other county, I hang up and call that county and get told I need to talk to the city PD because it is their jurisdiction and he says that he will transfer me. The phone rings once and a recording comes on that says I must first dial a 1 or 0 before dialing that number. I am starting to wonder if this is not my day to have police on my side. I hang up and call the dispatcher for the city PD tell the story and get told they will send an officer to the area and then hangs up. All this time I am still on my wife’s phone with my fellow employee who has decided to help locate truck for the PD to stop.
Fellow employee locates bad guy before I am on location, the bad guy has truck parked in a loading dock area not visible to the parking lot. As he pulls up to truck the bad guy comes out of a door on the loading dock, as he is told to stop where he is the bad guy jumps in truck and backs into my fellow employee’s company truck at a high rate of speed and pulls forward, but so does employee but he is hit multiple times until he finally has bad guy pushed up on loading dock. As I arrive employee who also has a CHL has his gun drawn and yelling for the bad guy to get out of truck. I arrive and immediately call 911 and get my gun and assist by covering bad guy and telling 911 where we are and that we had the bad guy at gun point and that we where CHL holders and that we were in a loading dock area, I assume they will keep on the phone to help guide the officer into our location but nope, click, they hang up. When I tell my fellow employee they hung up he is like really and starts to call 911 himself. I look around to check to make sure my wife is okay and has not gotten out of the truck and in that split second that I turn the bad guy gets up and runs around the opposite side of the trucks and as we give chase he disappears into a field. We retreat back to the trucks to wait on the police. While waiting on PD fellow employee tells me that one reason that he pulled his gun and got the bad guy out of truck was because it looked like he was digging around like he was looking for a weapon and he was also worried that someone else may be in the building that the bad guy came out of. When PD finally arrives about 15 minutes later they call in backup in hopes of locating the bad guy, six officers and a K9. Three hours later no bad guy and we are still waiting on a Sheriff’s deputy to show up from the reporting county in order to work the stolen truck case. The interaction with the officers on location was all positive, they never asked for CHL’s only took statements and apologized for the problems with dispatch and would look into why the 911 operator hung up on me. After it was all said and done I wish the bad guy had gone to jail but at least we got our truck back and no one got hurt.
I work in management for a specialized construction company, at around 4:30pm on Monday I received a call from one of my employees that he had pulled up to his house and started taking groceries inside and the next thing he knows the truck is taking off down the alley. Yes he had left the keys laying on the seat. I tell him to report it to the police and tell him I don’t think we have full coverage on the truck so it is probably just a loss and we will not see it again. A couple of hours later the driver remembers we have GPS on this truck, so I log in and locate the truck. Okay, this is where the story starts to sound like the Keystone cops, I call the county sheriff where the truck was reported stolen and the dispatcher immediately puts me on hold, and I throw on some shoes and grab my gun and wife in that order and head to the town the truck is in about 20 miles away. I end up being on hold for around 7 to 8 minutes and the phone starts ringing again, then goes to voice mail. I hang up and call back and dispatcher tries to put me on hold again, I tell the story about the truck being reported stolen and we have it on GPS location and I need to meet a deputy and the dispatcher puts me on hold any way. In the meantime I use my wife’s phone to call a fellow employee that lives close to the area that the truck is located in and ask him if he know which county it is in because I am not getting any help from the reporting county (can’t even get them on the phone). He tells me the area is in the other county, I hang up and call that county and get told I need to talk to the city PD because it is their jurisdiction and he says that he will transfer me. The phone rings once and a recording comes on that says I must first dial a 1 or 0 before dialing that number. I am starting to wonder if this is not my day to have police on my side. I hang up and call the dispatcher for the city PD tell the story and get told they will send an officer to the area and then hangs up. All this time I am still on my wife’s phone with my fellow employee who has decided to help locate truck for the PD to stop.
Fellow employee locates bad guy before I am on location, the bad guy has truck parked in a loading dock area not visible to the parking lot. As he pulls up to truck the bad guy comes out of a door on the loading dock, as he is told to stop where he is the bad guy jumps in truck and backs into my fellow employee’s company truck at a high rate of speed and pulls forward, but so does employee but he is hit multiple times until he finally has bad guy pushed up on loading dock. As I arrive employee who also has a CHL has his gun drawn and yelling for the bad guy to get out of truck. I arrive and immediately call 911 and get my gun and assist by covering bad guy and telling 911 where we are and that we had the bad guy at gun point and that we where CHL holders and that we were in a loading dock area, I assume they will keep on the phone to help guide the officer into our location but nope, click, they hang up. When I tell my fellow employee they hung up he is like really and starts to call 911 himself. I look around to check to make sure my wife is okay and has not gotten out of the truck and in that split second that I turn the bad guy gets up and runs around the opposite side of the trucks and as we give chase he disappears into a field. We retreat back to the trucks to wait on the police. While waiting on PD fellow employee tells me that one reason that he pulled his gun and got the bad guy out of truck was because it looked like he was digging around like he was looking for a weapon and he was also worried that someone else may be in the building that the bad guy came out of. When PD finally arrives about 15 minutes later they call in backup in hopes of locating the bad guy, six officers and a K9. Three hours later no bad guy and we are still waiting on a Sheriff’s deputy to show up from the reporting county in order to work the stolen truck case. The interaction with the officers on location was all positive, they never asked for CHL’s only took statements and apologized for the problems with dispatch and would look into why the 911 operator hung up on me. After it was all said and done I wish the bad guy had gone to jail but at least we got our truck back and no one got hurt.