When detectives warn most people that their car has become the target of a suspected car theft ring, they would do everything they could to hide it and keep it safe. But Colorado local Tyler Fox decided to do the opposite, and allowed his truck to be taken for the greater good.
After leaving his truck in the Rocky Mountain Metropolitan Airport, Fox received a notification on his phone. Someone tried to break in while he was away, so he called the local police.
They went to investigate and found that someone had, in fact, tried to break in. A small hole had been drilled into his truck. This seemed unusual, and it worried Fox. He was on a business trip to Arizona, and there wasn’t much he could do about it.
“I got a call about an hour later, from a detective saying, ‘Yes, your truck has been broken into. They haven’t taken anything, but we’ve been tracking these guys for a while, and we’re about 95% sure they’re gonna come back and steal it.” Fox saw an opportunity to do something about it.
Truck Shaped Temptation
Instead of asking the police to tow his car somewhere safer to avoid theft, he decided that he could work with them. He agreed to let them install a tracker in his car so that when they returned and took it, the police could track them to wherever they were stashing the vehicles they had been stealing.
According to CATPA Metropolitan Auto Theft Task Force commander John Pickard, the criminals had a clever system. They would target cars in airport carparks that they knew nobody would return to for weeks. This would allow them to take the vehicles without them being reported as stolen for some time. This way, they wouldn’t show up on number plate scanners.
Eventually, as expected, the thieves returned and stole the car. They were tracked and caught. Now, a new grand jury indictment has been announced of 11 defendants on 52 counts for carrying out a motor vehicle theft ring between July 2024 and January 2025. Tracking the stolen truck aided in the arrest of multiple suspects connected to the ongoing car theft ring.
The Head off the Snake
Despite their success in arresting several criminals involved in the car theft racket, Picket doesn’t believe this is the end. In a statement to CBS, he said: “We’ve cut the head off of this particular snake, but another one’s going to grow, because now we’ve created this void.”
Fox says he still parks his truck at the airport, although now he leaves it at DIA rather than Rocky Mountain. He’s happy to have been a part of the arrest, playing his part in keeping other cars a little safer for the time being.