Single Mother Stranded After Auto Thief Hits Carwash

Thinking back on what has happened to her in the last few days, LaDona Kelly describes herself as “feeling sick, strange and crazy. I have a lot of mixed emotions.”

No doubt indignation is one of them.

While Kelly was at the Century 21 Carwash in Inglewood on Friday, a thief came up and said her car was his, then drove off after an employee let him take the vehicle.

If such a scenario is any urban motorist’s nightmare, it is a disaster for Kelly.

Without her car, she can’t transport her two handicapped children to their many commitments. When the theft occurred, they were left waiting for her at school.

The car contained valuable cargo, including the single mother’s rent money and living expenses for all of February, $200 of it in cash. Also on board were her groceries for the month, unused coupons, her purse, glasses, house keys, the kids’ roller-skates and enough personal information to enable the assailant to drive to her house and loot it.

It was just a 1983 Nissan Sentra, but to Kelly, “it was everything.”

When she asked to file a report and seek recompense, carwash employees just shrugged, she said. Leave your number and someone will call you back, Kelly recalled being told.

No apology was given, and she didn’t even get back her $10 for the carwash until the Inglewood police officer who arrived demanded it for her, she said.

Kelly said that she left her phone number but that no one called for more than three days.

So Kelly, who moved here from Kansas four years ago, went to the police and the district attorney’s office. But she was told that their victim assistance programs didn’t cover stolen cars and certainly not their contents.

A lawyer friend told her that she could sue the carwash but that it would be months or even years before she might see any money.

Kelly didn’t have theft insurance, because she and her children live on just $1,158 a month in government checks for her 7-year-old son with cerebral palsy and her 11-year-old daughter with learning disabilities. After paying the rent, the utilities and the phone bill, she does not have much left. And she says she has no savings to tide her over.

In desperation, Kelly, 29, turned to the nonprofit Greater Los Angeles County Victim Assistance Center. But its calls to the carwash also fell on deaf ears, said victim outreach coordinator Louis Vargas.

“What really breaks our heart,” he said, “is that she is on welfare, with two physically disabled kids . . . and basically they are just shining her on.”

So Vargas called the media. And the media called the carwash. And Tuesday morning, when Kelly called the carwash again, manager Craig Takahashi referred her to the firm’s insurance broker.

“Shame on them,” insurance broker Mike Correa said of his clients. “The first I heard about it was this morning. . . . I called the [adjuster] and said, ‘This needs special handling, right away.’ ” Correa said he isn’t sure what will be covered or when Kelly will get compensation.

Police and carwash pros say such crimes are extremely rare.

“I’ve been in the carwash business 40 years and . . . I’ve just heard of a handful of incidents,” said Coy Lindblom, president of the Western Car Wash Assn.

Lt. Joe Freia of the Los Angeles Police Department’s commercial auto theft section called the crime “innovative.”

For his part, Takahashi attributed the delay to police instructions to wait until Tuesday so he could get the official report before submitting a claim.

And Takahashi said he wasn’t sure he was liable, because the theft “was more like a carjacking.”

He did confirm, however, that the thief did not have a weapon, did not use force and did not show a ticket stub before getting in the car and driving off.

In hindsight, he said, “If it happens again, I would call the insurance company right away.”

So now Kelly waits by the phone for the insurance adjuster. She is afraid to leave her house for fear the thief will come, and she can’t afford to have the locks changed. She has not yet told her landlord that she does not have the February rent.

Without the car, she and her son, Diaz, and daughter, Brandi, must make their way on foot, including the daily trek to school. “It hurts his legs when he has to walk distances,” she said of her son, who wears leg braces. “So it’s been hard for him.”

It’s been hard for Kelly too, emotionally as well as financially.

She bears no hostility toward the carwash personnel, except maybe for the suggestion that the crime wasn’t one of negligence, but one stemming from the kind of random urban violence that seems to permeate Los Angeles these days.

“I just want them to reimburse me for my losses,” she said. “And it would be nice for someone to say, ‘I’m sorry.’ ”