On Friday the 13th of April, my friend John walked out of his home on 15th St. below Meridian Hill Park to grab his wheels and head off to work.
The van was not where he had thought he had parked it.
John needs his vehicle to work. Among many other endeavors, he’s a professional dog walker, and he fills the van with four-legged friends in need of exercise at local parks. He searched in vain. Where was the darn van?
Gone. Stolen. He called the D.C. police and put out his own APB to friends:
“Please be on the lookout for my good ol’ Honda Odyssey mini-van, 1995, primer gray with purple bumpers,” and so forth.
Weekend passes. No word on the purple van. John rents a van for the dogs.
For kicks, John had signed up for a new, online service. “If you complete the brutally obtuse application process,” he explained, “they’ll send you an email notice, sooner or later, after they issue a ticket.” A friend said it helped him find his stolen car. He applied on Friday.
“Voila!” he wrote Tuesday morning, “I get notice of a parking ticket attached to my van, complete with address and time of issue.”
He calls the MPD. The officer promises to send someone over but says the van is probably gone. John works all day. No word from MPD. He drives over to the ticket’s address on Todd Place NE, two blocks east of North Capitol “and there she is! All wheels still on and more or less everything still on board including XM receiver, some dark chocolate mints and my beautiful bulb horn.”
But the cell phone was gone, the steering wheel was locked, the battery was dead and he had no spare key. Just then, a police cruiser rounded the corner, he flagged it down and an officer took a report. John returned to the rented van to wait for a tow truck. Hour two passed. He read a short story. He shooed away kids trying to rifle through his van.
He wonders: Did the MPD know his stolen van was ticketed? He pulls out the ticket to check the time: 5:30 p.m. Friday, the day the van was stolen.
“We learn that the stolen cars file doesn’t speak to the parking ticket file,” he says.
He also learned the police might not be the best stolen car sleuths. As the cop was taking his report, a woman who lives on Todd Place walked up with a friend. She told John she had seen the purple van Friday and notified the cops, but they didn’t check it out. “We shared some mordant laughter,” he says.
What can we learn from John’s predicament?
For one, don’t expect cops to find your stolen car. And sign up for the parking ticket alerts. They might help locate your lost wheels. By Thursday, six days after the purple van vanished, John was piling in the pups, and the van was back in action.
Harry Jaffe’s column appears on Tuesday and Friday. He can be contacted at [email protected].
