Security camera footage caught the thieves driving off in the Greens' Toyota Rav-4. (Allison Green/Fox59)
For one out of eight thieves, stealing a car is really easy.
According to the National Insurance Crime Bureau, that’s how frequently crooks make off with vehicles whose owners left the keys inside of them or nearby. Over 57,000 were reported to have been ripped off this way in 2015.
One busy Indianapolis family found this out the hard way when they forgot a backpack with a spare set of keys in it inside the Toyota Rav-4 that they’d just parked in their driveway on Sunday night, as they were unloading their two young children. When they woke up the next morning, the car was gone.
The owner, Allison Green, shared home security camera footage of the crime with WTHR that shows three figures enter the car and simply drive off.
Green and her husband reported the crime, then did a little detective work of their own and discovered the car parked in an apartment complex about a mile and a half away on Tuesday. Unfortunately, that’s not all they found.
After calling the cops for assistance, they took a look inside and saw that it was full of marijuana, cigar wrappers, alcohol bottles and a cache of apparently stolen goods that included a flat-screen TV and five new pairs of Jordan sneakers. There were also burn marks in the passenger seat and the car was generally a mess.
“We’re just glad to have it back in our possession,” Green told Fox59 News.
Green said that she was sharing her story as a cautionary tale. A neighbor also had a car stolen over the weekend when a 13-year-old used the garage door opener inside of it to get into the garage and found an extra set of keys.
Police later caught him when they spotted the vehicle and pulled it over as he was driving it. The teen hasn’t been connected to the Green theft, and no suspects have been publically identified.
The good news for car owners that find themselves in a similar situation is that carelessness isn’t a crime, but stealing cars is, so if they have theft coverage on their insurance policy it still applies, an NICB spokesman confirmed to Fox News.
Green did not reveal what kind of plan her family has.