If you’ve ever wondered what happens to your car after a tow truck hauls it away from a crash scene, a case out of Wayne County, Kentucky is a good reminder that it’s supposed to stay put until you say otherwise. Troy K. Hicks, owner and operator of Hicks Towing in Monticello, was arrested on July 28 after investigators say he tried to sell a customer’s vehicle on Facebook Marketplace without ever getting the owner’s okay.
The whole thing traces back to a routine accident call, reported LEX 18. On July 1, Hicks Towing got the job through Wayne County’s rotating wrecker list after a crash on Kentucky Highway East 92. The vehicle’s owner hadn’t asked for a specific towing company, so it just landed on Hicks’ lot the way these things normally do, no drama, no red flags, just a car waiting to be sorted out.
Fast forward about three and a half weeks, and a deputy gets a complaint about a listing on Facebook Marketplace. Turns out that same wrecked vehicle was up for sale under Hicks’ own personal account. Not the company page, not some formal auction notice, just a guy trying to flip somebody else’s car like it was a garage sale find.
Wayne County Sheriff Tim Catron’s office dug into it and says Hicks never contacted the owner, never legally transferred the title, and skipped the paperwork Kentucky requires before a towing company can even think about claiming ownership of an abandoned or unclaimed vehicle. On top of that, investigators determined the car didn’t even meet the legal criteria that would let Hicks Towing pursue ownership in the first place. He was arrested the next day.
What Hicks Is Being Charged With
Hicks now faces felony charges for theft by unlawful taking or disposition of an auto valued between $1,000 and $10,000, along with a charge for tampering with physical evidence.
Those are serious counts, and they underscore how much process actually stands between “your car got towed” and “your car legally belongs to someone else.”
How Towing and Abandoned Vehicle Laws Usually Work
Most states, Kentucky included, have a specific legal pathway towing companies have to follow before they can claim a vehicle as their own. That typically means notifying the owner, notifying any lienholder, waiting out a set storage period, and filing the right paperwork with the state before a title can change hands.
It’s a system built to protect car owners from exactly this scenario, someone else deciding your vehicle is fair game because it sat on a lot for a few weeks.
Our Take
We’ve covered a fair number of towing horror stories, and this one lands in a spot that should bother pretty much any car owner, enthusiast or not. Most of us hand our keys over to a tow truck driver assuming the car is just being moved, not quietly shopped around online while we’re waiting on insurance calls.
The system that requires notice and paperwork before a shop can claim a vehicle exists for a reason, and skipping straight to a Marketplace listing kind of defeats the whole point of having a tow rotation you can trust. Glad this one got caught before the car actually changed hands.