COLUMN/PERSPECTIVE: A missing key fob and a missing car | Local News | thebrunswicknews.com

2022-08-08 07:44:55 By : Ms. marry wang

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Clear skies. Low 73F. Winds S at 5 to 10 mph.

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Rebecca Weikel recently had a fun but harried day, up to a point. She had made three trips to Harris Teeter to get, among other things, ingredients for home-made pizza for dinner. It was the last trip that turned her into a sobbing pool of tears and perhaps wondering how much time she’d get off for good behavior.

She drove her white 2015 Mercedes GLK 350 to Harris Teeter for one last item. She had everything she needed but had somehow forgotten the pizza sauce, which, one could argue, literally makes a pizza a pizza.

“I ran in and ran back out,’’ she said, and in the parking lot found she had left her key fob in the Mercedes so she cranked up and headed to Shipwatch, where her family lived at the time.

“I got home and hit my (remote) gate opener, and the gate won’t open,’’ she said.

She tried three times and she and the car were still idling outside the gate. She may have thought something unkind about her husband and probably had a right to had her suspicions been correct.

“He changed out the gate opener and didn’t tell me,’’ she figured.

But if he did, he must have left another one in the car so she started looking.

“I look in the back seat and there are clothes. He left me his laundry,’’ she said.

As she looked closer she realized he had also gone shopping because she didn’t recognize some of the clothes, but there was one thing in his favor: The car was cleaner than she left it so he must have graciously cleaned it for her.

That should have made her feel at least a little bit better, but that clean interior delivered a stunning realization.

“This,’’ she thought, “is not my car.”

She turned around and headed back to Harris Teeter, and she called to tell them she was coming.

“By this time I’m crying,’’ she said.

She told the woman who answered the phone, “I took something that wasn’t mine, but I’m bringing it back.”

The woman on the phone was very gracious.

“That’s OK, Honey’’ she said. “Whatever you took you can keep.”

But Weikel was insistent through her tears: She had to return it.

“Ma’am,’’ the woman said. “If it makes you feel better ...”

By this time Weikel is crying really hard and begging the woman to please, please “Don’t call the police.” She was sobbing so badly she knows the woman on the other end was having a hard time understanding her but she nonetheless explained, “I took a car.”

“You took a cart? How did you get it in the car?’’ the helpful and understanding Harris Teeter person asked.

“No, “Weikel explained. “A car.”

She heard the phone hit a hard surface as the woman raced into the parking lot and found a couple looking inside a white 2015 Mercedes GLK. When Weikel got back, she said, “They were rifling through the glove box trying to figure out who took their car,” along with the clothes that were in the back seat and the garage door or gate opener.

Apologies were made and understandings were returned all in the absence of anyone with badges, handcuffs for the powers of arrest. Convicted car thieves have some advantages however. They don’t have to make four trips to the grocery to buy things for dinner, and they always know when they go to bed — bunk actually — what they’ll be wearing the next day with their one pair of shoes.

The resemblance between the matching Mercedes’ was amazing. Not only are both white, they both had beige interiors and matching scratches on the switches for the driver’s side power windows.

“Theirs was a lot cleaner,’’ she said.

The couple who had their car stolen were “real sweet and did not call the police,’’ Weikel said.

She is counting the blessing of the closed gate.

“If someone had gone through that gate ahead of me, I would have driven in behind them and gone upstairs and made pizza,’’ she said.

The lesson, of course, is to always take the key fob. She’s not saying the couple who owned the car she took and drove eight miles round trip were more careless than she because she’s sometimes left the fob in her car, too.

Pocketing your key fob doesn’t always assure you won’t be embarrassed like the time my grandson, Benjamin Earl Malone, then 6, stopped for something at the grocery. When we came out carrying our bags, I noticed something hanging from beneath the rear end of my silver Prius V. I dropped to a knee and was fingering the thick fabric strap when Benjamin said, in a tone that was exasperated and bordered on disrespectful, “Granddaddy! That’s not your car. We came in the truck.”

Indeed the light green Prius V that looked silver in the twilight was not mine. As the true owner walked up I pointed out that something was hanging from beneath her car. She thanked me and said she’d have her husband check it out.

Had it not been for young Benjamin I would have stood there wondering why my key fob wouldn’t unlock my car.

But all ended well as it did for Weikel and the true owners of the briefly purloined Mercedes GLK 350. They got their car back as they had left it with the exception of a few ounces of fuel burned. Real car thieves have a reputation for recklessness.

Weikel said, “I drove that car like I owned it.”

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