Trying to Learn What Made Her Car a Target
Recent victim Ronnita Wilkins at a forum on car theft held in February.
(By Hamil R. Harris -- The Washington Post)
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It's not what Ronnita Wilkins saw on Valentine's Day morning this year when she happened to look out the window of her Temple Hills apartment. It's what she didn't see -- her 1997 Dodge Intrepid.
She had parked it in the lot of her building the day before, and now it was gone. A series of thoughts and questions raced through her head: How would she get to work and to school? Would she have to get another car? How much would that cost?
Wilkins, 24, a mortuary science student at the University of the District of Columbia, was so upset that she decided to take action. She had learned about an upcoming forum on auto thefts and decided to attend to see whether she could find out why a thief would want her car -- or any car, for that matter.
"What made me a target?" Wilkins asked a reformed auto thief who had been invited to the forum in February to talk about his experience stealing cars.
Several days after Wilkins's car was stolen, police located it in the parking lot of an apartment complex in Southeast Washington. Police told Wilkins that three men used a screwdriver to start the ignition and drive off with her Intrepid, a popular make among car thieves in the Washington suburbs. Police did make an arrest in the case. "I drove it back home with the screwdriver still in the ignition," said Wilkins, who had the car repaired and still drives it.
More than two months after her ordeal, Wilkins said she still feels uneasy. She said she is not as trusting as she once was and she's thinking about moving out of the county.
"I put a bar on my steering wheel every time I got to the store," she said. "I don't care if it's to the 7-Eleven. When I go outside and see the guys standing around, I always look at them. I wonder if the person who stole my car is coming back."
-- HAMIL R. HARRIS
