Dori: Seattle-area thieves claim ownership of truck, handed keys at tire center

If the stolen pickup owned by a Seattle-area contractor could talk, its wild tale of theft would be almost unbelievable.

Construction business owner Joe reached out to The Dori Monson Show on Thursday with a crime Joe calls “mindboggling.” Joe asked that his last name not be used to protect his construction company employees.

It started Monday morning when Joe dropped off their company pickup – complete with logo on the doors — at a local tire shop. When Joe’s adult son went back in the afternoon to pick it up, he returned to Joe in the parking lot empty-handed.

“Dad, they gave the keys to somebody else,” Joe’s son told him.

What ruse did the thieves use to obtain the keys from the tire shop?

Joe says they just went in and asked for the keys to the truck. The tire store worker assumed the thief was Joe’s employee, and handed the keys to the thief.

But it gets crazier.

Two days later, Joe gets a call from the King County Sheriff’s Office telling him his truck has been spotted, parked without keys near Black Diamond at Flaming Geyser State Park in Auburn, 20 miles from where it was first stolen.

“So I’m boogieing down there as quick as I can,” Joe said, when he gets another call from the police: “Your truck was just stolen again.”

To Joe’s surprise, the police decide to pursue the truck, and Joe decided he “wanted to be part of it.”

Narrowing their search to an area around Green Valley Road and Maple Valley Highway, “police caught up with them,” Joe described. Only a few minutes behind the chase, Joe found “seven or eight police cars” surrounding the pickup, but the thieves had “jumped the guardrail and fled off into the woods.”

“At that time, the chase was on,” Joe said. “They had the dogs; they had deployed the K9s.”

Joe says detectives told him Thursday that while resisting the K9s, one of the thieves was injured enough to be hospitalized.

But the story doesn’t end here.

In bits of information Joe has pieced together, it’s his understanding that the injured thief was released from the hospital and likely won’t face charges because “the case does not meet the multiple criteria for prosecution.”

“Are we the fools that are buying our groceries? Buying our tools? And buying our electronics?” Joe asked.

“We’re the hardworking taxpayers. I work 12 hours a day,” Joe continued. “I’m 52 years old and I come home beat up, and we spend our money on groceries that are inflated because we have to cover the costs for all the theft.”

After 30 years in business in this state, Joe says: “We’re done — we are getting out of Washington.”

Listen to Dori Monson weekday afternoons from noon – 3 p.m. on KIRO Newsradio, 97.3 FM. Subscribe to the podcast here.