ANY police report will do.
Stolen Cars Stream South of Borderby Pam Easton
Posted Feb 20, 2004Houston - Former Houston Oilers football player Alonzo Highsmith has wondered for years what happened to his fully-loaded Ford F-250 diesel truck after it was stolen from a Houston restaurant parking lot.
"Sometimes I look up at the sky and the stars and wonder where that truck is," said Highsmith, who financed the $30,000 truck just weeks before its 1995 theft.
Almost a decade later, the truck was located in Guatemala by Houston police, who found more than 3,200 stolen vehicles--most from Texas, California and Florida--by tracing vehicle identification numbers through a Guatemalan database.
"I was hoping that it would be found, but as the weeks and months went by I thought, 'Well, that is the end of this truck.' I was like a grieving parent," said Highsmith, now a scout for the Green Bay Packers. He learned of his truck's whereabouts from The Associated Press. Guatemalan authorities are now trying to recover it by locating the person who registered it there.
Through database work, Houston police want to stem the flow of an estimated 200,000 vehicles that vanish south of the border each year.
Quick, what does your talking points sheet have to say about that?