You shouldn’t ALWAYS believe what your mother tells you. Like that time she said your face was going to freeze into a frown unless you turned it upside down. Have you ever seen any solid evidence of frozen frowns?
Or, like when she said you had to avoid sidewalk cracks to keep from breaking your mother’s back. I stepped on some cracks, but my mother’s spine remained intact until she left us at age 83 years and two months.
My own daughter likes to remind me of a falsehood I uttered in her childhood.
When she kept refusing dishes that contained mushrooms, I told her eating mushrooms makes people prettier.
She ate fungi for years, until she figured out that motherly manipulation was at play. Bottom line, she is and always has been plenty pretty.
However, please don’t try this at home. Manipulation has its drawbacks. There’s been so much discussion about my misstatement over the decades, I’m afraid she’s going to have my tombstone engraved thus: “Lied big-time about mushrooms.”
But if your mother tells you to always lock your car and carry away the keys, you should listen. She’s really, really right, and listening will save you – and the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office – tons of grief.
A Jan. 9 Leader story, written by staffer Tony Krausz, reported that vehicle thefts in the county hit a record high in 2019, rising to an estimated 360, a 6 percent increase over 2018. And here’s an astounding tidbit: At least 305 of the vehicles had been left unlocked, and 252 of those had the keys inside. And, yes, as consumers of Leader crime briefs know, some of those vehicles had been left running.
Take my car, please, oh, pretty please.
The Sheriff’s Office suspects the number of unlocked vehicles is actually higher than reported. That’s because 291 of the stolen vehicles were recovered, and most of those did not have ignition damage, suggesting that keys were available to the thieves, even when owners claimed they were not.
The Sheriff’s Office was kind in sharing this information, saying those crime victims probably just forgot where their keys were when the car was stolen. Ummm, if the keys aren’t in your purse or your pocket, where might they happen to be?
I understand the shame that seals victims’ lips. We used to leave our vehicles unlocked. We also used to leave leather CD keepers in the car, stuffed with our favorite tunes.
One night, while standing at the kitchen sink, I saw someone park in our driveway, open our unlocked Saturn, grab our CD case and speed away. Lesson learned. Except…
A few years later, one of us – I’m saying it wasn’t me and don’t assume I’m lying because of the mushrooms – left a car unlocked at the grocery store. The thief got the CDs along with our garage door opener and the new GPS device our kids had just given us for Christmas.
They didn’t get the car – because even with having to be taught a painful lesson twice, at least we’d held onto our keys.
The Sheriff’s Office says groups of thieves are coming into the county, heading to subdivisions, looking for unlocked vehicles and driving them off.
How about we stop making it so easy, the cops request. Sheriff Dave Marshak is appearing in a 30-second TV commercial to preach that message. The PSA began airing on Spectrum (Charter) cable channels Jan. 10 and will air on various channels at various times until Feb. 10.
Think about the time our law enforcers will save if they don’t have to respond to crimes that could be so easily avoided.
There’s another potential pitfall I call the “Oh, Susannah,” in honor of a former colleague by that name who rushed in late to a newsroom meeting one morning.
She’d been at the gym and had carefully hidden her purse under some car debris before locking up and heading indoors.
The watching crook knew which vehicle’s window to smash. And no need to “look” for the purse. He knew where it was.
We shouldn’t have to be told not to leave valuables in the car, but you’ve seen those crime reports, too – where guns, cash and laptops went straight from the (often-unlocked) vehicle into the crook’s knapsack. While vehicles, albeit damaged, might return home, our possessions rarely do.
Since we probably want to keep our stuff AND our cars, we should listen to these words from Sheriff’s Office spokesman Grant Bissell.
“It is frustrating for us and the citizens who have to deal with this stuff. You can take steps to make it much more difficult and almost impossible for someone to take your vehicle. These are not rocket scientists reprograming computers. They are going into vehicles, finding keys and taking vehicles.”
We like to tell our police officers to stay safe out there. In return, they’re simply asking us to stay smart out there.
Lock it, pocket the key. Mom agrees, I’m positive.
