Here today, gone tomorrow

May 4—Dee Vestal walks into the garage and pauses for a moment while looking at a hook on the wall. It's a small thing, but the empty hook represents something that was lost for Vestal about six months ago.

"My mom had said so many times that she felt so safe here," Vestal said. "Honestly, we felt safe here too."

For Vestal, that sense of security was shattered on Nov. 16, 2022. Someone broke into her mother's home in east St. Joseph, filled pillowcases with jewelry, then grabbed the keys from a hook in the garage and escaped in the Chrysler minivan. At the time, Vestal was still grieving from attending her mother's funeral service two days earlier.

"It was a nightmare," she said. "Sometimes you get a false sense of security. You see vehicles getting stolen and think, 'Well, it's never going to happen to us because we're careful. I'm not leaving my car out with the keys in it.'"

ONE OF MANY

On that day, Vestal made one of the 434 vehicle theft reports to the St. Joseph Police Department in 2022. Most of those reports wind up in the hands of Michelle Ritter, a property crimes detective.

Vestal's case was unusual in that someone forced entry into the home to steal the vehicle. To Ritter, most vehicle thefts share a common theme.

"Going over reports I've dealt with in the last couple of years, the person has left their keys in their vehicle, left their keys running or left their keys accessible for someone," Ritter said.

Taken on the whole, that means vehicle theft is in many ways a preventable crime, but that doesn't make it any easier for those who become victims.

"It's not just the loss of a vehicle," said Michelle Davidson, the Buchanan County prosecutor. "Sometimes it's the loss of a job because if you don't have your vehicle, you're looking at maybe not having your transportation to get to work. If you have children, you can imagine all the places you're driving them to, getting them to school or getting them to their activities."

To this day, Vestal sometimes kicks herself for leaving the keys hanging on a hook. Then she remembers that someone had to kick in a steel door to gain entry to the house and the vehicle. Timothy Richard Park, 36, faces a felony stealing charge in connection with the case.

Vestal, noting that the defendant in the case had prior offenses, would like St. Joseph to become the kind of place where criminals think twice before stealing a vehicle, regardless of the circumstances.

"Sometimes I feel like if the car thieves don't really have a lot of consequences, why wouldn't this be the place they all come to steal cars?" she said. "So I think it would be great if St. Joe was not the place to steal a car because they'd come down heavy-handed on those who did."

FRUSTRATIONS

A records request with the city of St. Joseph found that of those 434 vehicle theft reports, only 59 cases were submitted to a prosecutor. Asked about the difference, police said every case is investigated. Ritter employs a range of investigative techniques and networking to locate vehicles and refer cases for criminal charges. But some cases, especially those with witnesses or video, are stronger than others.

The detective said it's not uncommon to find that the person reporting the theft doesn't actually have title to the vehicle. Some don't want to prosecute after the vehicle is recovered.

"If a victim says, 'I don't want to prosecute,' then we're done," Ritter said. "It's equally frustrating that we have the number of individuals that are willing to commit these crimes."

Ritter said police do notice a revolving door between prison and criminal activity.

"We get them charged, they go to prison and then they come back," she said.

Data from the Missouri Office of State Courts Administrator shows 69 cases of tampering or motor vehicle theft in Buchanan County last year. Both charges carry the same maximum of seven years in prison.

Of those cases, 27 resulted in a guilty plea, three were dismissed and 39 were still pending at the end of the year. Davidson, who became prosecutor in January, said she's seen judges give sentences ranging from probation for first-time offenses to the full seven years for repeat violations. She said offenders usually don't serve their entire prison term.

"It gets placed in the hands of the Department of Corrections," she said. "A person gets five years but they don't serve the full five years. They'll do a certain percentage of that and then they'll be released."

Buchanan County also saw 18 vehicle theft or tampering cases in Juvenile Court last year, suggesting that several crimes are committed by minors. Ritter said people of all ages steal vehicles for a variety of reasons, sometimes to joyride or sometimes to get some sort of value out of the car or truck.

"It could just be to commit crimes so that a plate won't track back to them," Ritter said. "They may be cold. We see that in the winter. Sometimes people just steal vehicles because they don't have any place to be."

CHECKING DOORS

One reason vehicle thefts remain a nagging problem — and not just for St. Joseph — is that the perpetrator sees it as a low-risk, high-reward crime. Someone who breaks into a house commits a major offense after going through the front door. The criminal then has to worry about whether someone is waiting inside with a gun.

The vehicle thief can just go down the street checking door handles.

"Which is why I think we're having so much of it," Ritter said. "If I'm walking down the street and I see a car and I pull that door handle and it's locked, I just keep walking. Nobody saw anything. I'm not in trouble for anything. If that door was unlocked and the keys are in it, I could just jump in and take it. It's easy."

But maybe not forever. A state lawmaker from St. Louis filed a bill that would make it a felony to check multiple door handles to steal a vehicle. Rep. Jim Murphy, a Republican, said communities across the state feel under siege.

"What we have today is a new breed of crime and that's gangs coming through our neighborhoods and checking door knobs on all the cars," Murphy said. "It's almost at a new level now. We want to put some teeth into our laws to try to prevent this because it's terrorizing neighborhoods."

Murphy hopes to get his bill passed before the legislative session ends on May 12.

LINGERING IMPACT

Davidson said the ease of stealing a car shouldn't minimize the seriousness of the offense.

"I never think we should victim blame at all," Davidson said. "In the end, it's ultimately the defendant, the person who stole the vehicle. At no time should anyone ever be trying car doors of another person's vehicle to see if it opens."

Vestal said her family still owns the Chrysler minivan, but she feels a little uneasy when she climbs into it these days. It's hard to get over the sense of violation even six months after that awful day in November.

"When we brought it home, it kind of smelled like cigars. Those brown cigarettes," she said. "I had to park it for a couple of days before I could get in it because it was just so hurtful, the fact that someone was in there."

Greg Kozol can be reached at greg.kozol@newspressnow.com. Follow him on Twitter: @NPNowKozol.