Victim of an SUV-Hate Crime

By Warren Brown
Sunday, July 22, 2007; G02

Gareth Groves has every right to be angry. But he said he isn't that kind of person.

"I've been pretty calm about all of this," said Groves, a District resident who last week became the latest victim of a Hummer bashing. "I'm trying to stay calm," Groves said. "I'm trying not to get angry."

It's hard work.

Groves was awakened by police at 3:30 a.m. Monday. One of the officers apologized to him for being "the bearer of bad news."

"He asked me if I was the owner of a Hummer," Groves recalled. "I told him that I was. He told me that my Hummer had been damaged."

Groves was thinking sideswipe, hit and run, the kind of thing that often happens to vehicles parked on urban streets. He never imagined that his 2005 Hummer H2 SUT (Sport Utility Truck) Crew Cab had been battered by bats, sliced with knives and whacked and hacked in the rear by what investigating officers suspected was a machete.

He was speechless.

He intended to remain speechless.

But some sympathetic neighbors who saw the damaged truck urged him to speak up. He resisted. "So, one of my neighbors called the media," Groves said.

He said he didn't want the publicity, didn't want to answer the questions many of us feel we shouldn't have to answer about exercising our freedom of choice in a putatively free marketplace.

"I figured the only thing the media would want to know is why I bought a Hummer, instead of focusing on what happened," said Groves, who holds an undergraduate degree in communications.

What happened was a crime, a violent attack on personal property. The battering and slicing were accompanied by an inscription ("FOR THE ENVIRON") scratched into the body of Groves's four-wheel-drive Hummer. That possibly elevates the attack to an act of eco-terrorism, according to some law enforcement officers who interviewed Groves.

Such attacks are not uncommon, according to Ron DeFore, Washington spokesman for the Sport Utility Vehicle Owners of America (SUVOA), a group representing 80 million U.S. owners of SUVs and other light trucks.

"The hostility toward SUVs started in the late 1990s," DeFore said in a recent interview. "SUVs were being blamed for everything -- the war in Iraq, carnage on the highways, guzzling gas. If a driver of a car hit and killed someone, news stories said the driver did it. But if the driver of an SUV did the same thing, the stories said the SUV killed a person, as if the SUV had a mind of its own."

SUVOA contends that the vilification of SUVs has created an environment in which some anti-SUV activists feel justified in destroying those vehicles.

That is why Groves said he wanted to remain mum. He was a victim. But he was afraid of being portrayed as a villain, of getting what some anti-SUV types "said I deserved for buying a SUV," he said.

"That kind of talk does make me angry. But I try to forget it," Groves said.

His destroyed Hummer H2 SUT Crew Cab is a niche vehicle, one of 23,213 H2 models sold by General Motors in 2005. Groves bought his model used, paying an estimated $38,000 to take it off the hands of an owner who was tired of filling the 32-gallon tank with regular unleaded gasoline -- and getting 14 miles per gallon.

Overall H2 sales, including SUT Crew Cab models and the more popular wagons, have plummeted 26.3 percent, falling to 17,107 vehicles sold in 2006. That's a clear indication that the market is doing what it does best -- weeding out products that have become too expensive because of externalities such as rising fuel prices, and doing that weeding without compromising freedom of choice in the marketplace.

Groves is okay with the workings of the market. "If you don't want a Hummer, don't buy one," he said. Just leave people alone who choose to do otherwise.

The neighbors who have come to his aid -- and there have been many, he said -- have similar sentiments. They viewed the attack on his Hummer as an attack against them -- their right to own property, regardless of whether that property is a house or a Hummer. "It made a lot of people uncomfortable," Groves said.

Why did he buy the H2 SUT Crew Cab?

Groves answered reluctantly.

"No," he said, unlike many H2 SUT Crew Cab owners, "I'm not into extreme sports or off-roading. I'm more one of those guys who would appreciate it [the Hummer] not being dirty."

Why buy it, then?

"I like the way it looks," said Groves, 32, who is getting into the sports marketing business. "I like the image." He also likes power. The man's daily driver is a Dodge Charger RT sedan with a 5.7-liter, 340-horsepower Hemi V-8 engine. That's 15 more horsepower than the maximum 325-horsepower output of the six-liter V-8 in the H2 SUT Crew Cab. But the Charger RT is a substantially lighter vehicle. It gets 25 miles per gallon on the highway.

Groves said he's getting his Hummer fixed. "Definitely," he said. "I'm getting it back." After which, he said he will move out of the District to a more Hummer-friendly environment in suburban Maryland where there will be more space to park his rig and, he hopes, fewer people willing to trash it.