The Day I Looked Crime Straight in the Face

We have to stop meeting like this.

What I mean is, we have to stop meeting under these circumstances, when I feel compelled to relate yet another true tale of crime in the naked city. But that would mean that criminals would have to start leaving me alone, and they don’t seem especially cooperative.

This time, again, I wasn’t the victim, technically, just as I wasn’t the victim last winter when a masked gunman entered a Northridge liquor store I’d dropped by to buy a Coke.

But this time, in this crime, I was much less of a bystander.

It happened the other night. The woman who is threatening to marry me had parked on the street outside my house. We went out for dinner and as I drove back home up the gently sloping lane, I noticed something was missing.

‘Where’s your car?”

“Where is my car?” she responded, before adding something unprintable.

At that moment we saw headlights coming downhill in the darkness. As the car passed, we could see it was her beat-up ’86 Honda Prelude, the thief at the wheel.

He noticed us noticing him and sped away.

*

Our reactions--mine and hers--were impulsive. And so the chase was on--slowly, at first. Turning 180 degrees wasn’t so easy on my narrow street. The Prelude was out of view as we slalomed past parked cars on the winding, quarter-mile downhill. At the first intersection, I turned right because that was the quickest way out of the neighborhood. Still no Prelude.

Next we came to a T intersection. Perhaps 300 yards to the right, a car was braking at a red light. The car was dark and looked about the right size and shape. I drove fast but not too fast, slowing as we approached.

It was her car.

She wrote down the license plate number that I assumed she’d have memorized long ago. The thief didn’t seem to notice us. How I wish we had a cell phone. But without a cell phone, what is one to do?

My gas gauge was very low. The thought of running on empty in pursuit of a car thief into gang turf didn’t thrill me.

So now what?

What I did next was probably foolhardy. But I can’t say I regret it.

I turned the steering wheel to the right and eased alongside him. I stared into his face. He stared back at me. Thus we could later tell the police he was a husky Latino in his mid-20s with short-cropped hair and a goatee. He appeared to be wearing a patterned flannel shirt over a white T-shirt.

Our eyes locked for a second. The thief’s expression was impassive. Then he gunned the Prelude through the red light and across the wide boulevard.

We drove back home and called the cops.

*

I listened as she started to make her report. Then we hit a snafu. Although my sweetie had been driving the car for months, it was still registered under a friend’s name. The police, therefore, wouldn’t take the stolen-car report and broadcast it to patrol units.

Officer Eduardo Fones, an LAPD spokesman, would later explain to me this is standard policy; otherwise, police have no way of knowing if the registered owner had simply lent the car to yet another friend.

There’s some logic to this, of course, but it sure seemed like a stupid policy that night to two people who had eyeballed a thief and knew he didn’t have anybody’s permission.

It took some time and wits, but the police finally took a stolen-car report. There was another snafu--transposed license plate letters led to a Buick--but eventually it was straightened out.

The car, I figured, was probably in a chop shop by then. The cops suggested another possibility: that it had been stolen to be used in a crime.

There didn’t seem much left to do.

“Give me your car keys,” she said after a while. “I’m going to look for my car.”

Suffice it to say that she is no ordinary damsel in distress. I wouldn’t give her the keys, but searching for the car seemed more interesting than watching TV. Maybe the thief, knowing we got a good look at him, decided to ditch the car not long after he ditched us. The chances were awfully slim, but the potential for confrontation made me reach for a metal softball bat--”just in case,” I told her--as we headed out.

We searched the neighborhood the thief vanished into, finding nothing.

It was well past midnight when the phone rang. The police had located the car about 75 minutes after we’d last seen it, about three miles north of where we had been searching.

There was something else: The car had been torched, a total loss.

*

The moral of this story?

A few prosaic ones come to mind. Maybe cell phones have their moments, even if there’s no guarantee you’ll get through on 911. And my sweetie, who has since reclaimed the old BMW she’d given to her brother when the Prelude came her way, bought one of those steering-wheel locks for extra security.

This is, incidentally, the same BMW that had its windshield shattered a few years ago by a brick thrown from the side of the Pasadena Freeway. I was her passenger that day. Neither of us were hurt, but as friends told us then, “You could have been killed!”

For a couple of days I wondered what possessed me to put aside caution and drive up alongside the thief. When I saw the masked gunman in the liquor store, I didn’t hesitate to duck out of view. The notion that the thief might have a gun and might be willing to use it didn’t seem to occur to me or my girlfriend. Even after the fact, this was just a passing thought, perhaps because he didn’t point one at my face. Family and friends seemed more frightened by our telling than we were.

“I think you and your girlfriend are lucky,” Officer Funes said. What if, he said, the thief was a two-time loser facing a long prison term? He might be willing to kill, figuring he’d be facing life in prison either way.

Oh, I wanted to get a good look at the creep. I wanted to be, as police say, “a good witness.” But I’ve come to believe something more important than that possessed me.

I just wanted to look at the scumbag. I wanted him to know that he had, in a sense, been caught in the act. That he wasn’t that clever. And that we weren’t that afraid.

*

Scott Harris’ column appears Tuesdays, Thursdays and Sundays. Readers may write to him at The Times’ Valley Edition, 20000 Prairie St., Chatsworth 91311, or via e-mail at scott.harris@latimes.com Please include a phone number.