In New York City two men in a green station wagon bump into a taxi. When cabdriver Gloria Cano, 49, gets out to inspect the damage, one of the men knocks her down and drives off in her cab. In Baton Rouge 18-year-old college student Kipp Gullett is shot to death by carjackers who want his aging Bronco II solely for a joy ride. In Washington, D.C., carjackings average two a day. In Detroit there were 74 in one week. In Miami and Los Angeles the numbers were also high.
Suddenly, it seems, accidents are not the only danger facing drivers. An increasing number of robberies, muggings, rapes and murders on America's roads and highways have made travelers justifiably cautious. "There used to be two places where Americans felt completely safe," says Rep. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.), who sponsored recently enacted legislation making carjacking a federal crime. "One was when they were in their homes—and that ended with so many homes being burglarized. The other was in their cars—but not anymore."
In cities and suburbs across the country, carjacking has become a new and frighteningly common form of car theft. It takes only seconds for thieves to order drivers out of their cars—usually at gun-or knifepoint—then drive off in the stolen vehicles, which are later resold or stripped for spare parts. "We're being inundated with carjackings," says police Lt. Alphonso Hawkins of Prince Georges County, Md., in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. "And it's not just expensive cars—Volvos, BMWs or Mercedeses. Most of the vehicles are Fords, Chevys, Toyotas—-from the '70s right on up."
Most auto-related crimes are random—what police call crimes of opportunity. A would-be carjacker may see a promising situation and take advantage of it, sometimes committing even more serious crimes in the process. Until Schumer's law went into effect in October, the FBI did not keep statistics on carjackings. But in the first nine months of 1992, officials say, there were 21,112 such crimes in the U.S. Usually thieves are satisfied to make off with a car, but not infrequently the consequences are bloody. Here are some examples from police blotters around the country:
A suburban mother in Maryland is dragged to her death
It was Sept. 8; Pamela Basu, 34, an Indian-born research chemist living in Savage, Md., had been looking forward to this day for weeks. Her adopted 22-month-old daughter, Sarina, was starting preschool, and Basu wanted everything to go just right. Around 8:30 A.M., she left her townhouse between Washington, D.C, and Baltimore, strapped Sarina into the car seat of her BMW and drove In the stop sign at the rail of the parking lot. Suddenly two unarmed men appeared. They yanked Basu from her car, but as she struggled to reach the child, her left arm became tangled in the seat belt. When the car sped away, Basu was dragged along with it. "She looked like one of those dummies they stuff up for Halloween," said a horrified neighbor, Catherine Nehring, who couldn't believe what she was seeing.
The BMW went about 1,000 feet and stopped, Nehring told reporters. Then the driver got out, stepped over Basu, walked around the car and opened the right rear door. "He grabs this baby, this little girl in a car scat and just tosses her in the road," Nehring said. "And then he speeds off."
Nehring gathered up Sarina and called police, but Basu was still hanging from the car. She was dragged for more than a mile, leaving a gruesome trail of blood and flesh on a winding, two-lane, country road. A few minutes later police gave chase, and the car crashed into a fence. Both men were arrested. Rodney Eugene Solomon, 26, and Bernard Eric Miller, 17—both of Washington—are being held without bail on a host of charges including murder, kidnapping and robbery. Police say they ventured off a nearby interstate in search of a car when their own ran out of gas. Their trial is to begin Feb. 22.
As it happened, the Basu ease was the first in a wave of carjackings that aroused fear throughout the Washington area. But it was Pamela Basu's death that helped overcome automakers' objections to Schumer's carjacking bill. The new law also requires the auto industry to mark 13 different car parts with identification numbers, making it difficult to sell stolen parts. "There are so many good things Pam has done in her life," says her husband, Steve. "I just hope that [her death] will prevent tragedies like this from happening to other people."
The FBI wasted no time in its war against carjackers. It promptly added agents to its Operation Safe Streets program, which combats violent urban crime. In the District of Columbia, some local police officers have volunteered to act as FBI decoys, hoping to tempt and trap carjackers. For example, undercover cop Glaytonia Hill—unarmed but wearing a bulletproof vest under her coat—makes late-night stops at lonely filling stations, hoping to lure thieves into stealing her car. Even if they tried, they wouldn't get far. Hill's specially equipped car can be stopped by her backup team, using remote control. Hill, 24, who is single, volunteered for the job because of Pam Basu. "I just got tired of hearing about this happening to other women," she says.
A test drive in Colorado turns into a kidnapping and bank robbery
It had been an unusually busy Thursday at Burt Chevrolet in Englewood, Colo. Around noon on July 2, salesman Dan Bergh, 30, got a call to show a white 1992 Chevy Starcraft van. He and the customer talked for a while, then decided to go for a demo ride. The customer—a dark-haired man with a pockmarked face—drove for a couple of minutes, then pulled over. He drew a long-barrelled .44-caliber pistol and put it to Bergh's forehead. "He said, 'Just do what I tell you to do, or I'm going to cap you,' " Bergh recalls. "I hadn't heard that phrase before, but I knew what he meant." The gunman ordered Bergh to lie face down in the rear of the van, then tied his hands and feet with a nylon rope. "He told me he was going to rob a bank," the salesman says.
The gunman pulled up at Bank Western. While he was inside—wearing a ski mask, brandishing his pistol and scooping money from tellers' drawers—Bergh was struggling to get free. "I had worked my right wrist loose, enough where I thought I could pull it out," he says. "I kept the rope cupped up in my hands so he couldn't tell." Suddenly tin; gunman jumped in the van, tossed a bag of money at Bergh's feel and started the engine. "He took off in a panic, driving at a high rate of speed," says Bergh.
Five minutes later the gunman pulled up behind a grocery store and left the van, taking the money with him. Bergh wriggled his right hand free, got into the driver's seat without even taking time to free his feel and started the engine. "I went screeching out onto Arapahoe Road," he says, and was promptly spoiled by police. "They were looking for the van," he says. "They were going to roadblock it, so I ran the van up onto the curb."
Two days later, FBI agents in Boise, Idaho, arrested Corbin Charles Emdy, 50, as he tried to buy an AK-47. Although he was identified by Bergh, he was extradicted to Bakersfield, Calif., where he was wanted for allegedly murdering his brother, Edwin. Meanwhile, Burt Chevrolet now requires salesmen to notify a telephone operator before and after test drives and to check customers' drivers' licenses. And the carjacking remains very much on Bergh's mind. "You see this in the movies, you read about this," he says. "But this never happens to anybody I know or to me."
A victim fights back, mortally wounding a would-be carjacker
Last Oct. 9, Rayne Gough, 33, and Elena Esparza, 35, were sitting in her white 1989 Chevrolet Beretta in the parking lot of the El Torito Mexican restaurant in the Mission Valley section of San Diego. It was 11:40 P.M., and they were saying goodnight after having had a drink inside. Gough's Ford pickup truck was parked two spaces away. Unseen by them, a Ford Escort pulled up behind, and three men got out. One walked up to the driver's side. "He tapped on the glass and shouted, 'Get out of the ear or I'll blow your head off!' " Gough recalls. Instead the couple did something police do not recommend: They resisted.
First, Esparza tried to back up, but the Ford had them boxed in. Then Gough started honking the horn, futilely hoping to get someone's alien-lion. The would-be carjacker, who had been bluffing about the gun, responded by smashing in the window of the driver's door with a pair of vise grips, then leaning into the car and beating Esparza on the shoulders and back. With that, Gough pulled out the hunting knife he keeps attached to his backpack and plunged it into the attacker's neck. "All I was concerned about was someone I loved very dearly being beaten," he says. "I wasn't about to sit there and let him do it."
The attacker's friends rushed him to a hospital, and the couple called police. At 4:30 A.M. they learned that David Ray Gooch, 25, had died, and that Daniel Hilburn, 28, and Robert Lee Bible had been arrested. "The news sent a shock wave that started at the core of my body and moved out to the surface," Gough says. "I was afraid, very afraid and angry and tired. But I know I had done nothing wrong." On the other hand, police believe Esparza was unwise to resist in the first place. "We tell people when something like this happens, just let them have your car," says San Diego police Lt. Barbara Harrison. "It's only a car. It isn't worth dying for."
A trip to a New Jersey grocery ends in kidnapping and death
Gail Shollar had errands to run. The Beauty and the Beast video her family had rented was already overdue, and there were groceries to buy. So at 7:30 P.M., as voters were still hurrying to the polls on Election Day, Similar, 35, of Piscataway, N.J., packed her 3-year-old daughter, Andrea, into the family's 1992 blue Plymouth Voyager mini van and headed out into the rainy night. Her husband, Robert, 35, stayed home with their two older children, Sherri, 10, and Bobby, 8. He dozed off around 10:30 while waiting for his wife and daughter to return and awoke five hours later to discover they were still not home. He promptly telephoned police.
At 6:30 the next morning, two leaching assistants at a local day-care center, Michelle Pirka and Joyce Bass, found a coatless Andrea lying on the lawn, cold and wet but otherwise in good shape. "It seemed to me that she had been out there all night," Pirka says. From what little Andrea could tell police, a black man had taken the van forcibly at a stoplight, then dropped the little girl off. Later that morning, police found the minivan a mile or so from the shopping center. Inside were Shollar's clothing and traces of blood.
By Friday, Nov. 6, two more women in the area had been attacked by a would-be carjacker but managed to escape. Though police said the cases were not related to Shollar's disappearance, the level of fear in Piscataway, a quiet suburban town about an hour from Manhattan, became palpable. "I went out this morning and bought a knife to carry in the car," says Dom Fruges, a paint company manager. "I got one for my wife too. You aren't safe anywhere these days."
The next day police found Shollar's nude body in a flooded drainage ditch in a lumberyard not far from where the van had been found. She had been stabbed repeatedly in the face, neck and chest. Police also believe Shollar had not been grabbed at a stoplight but in a shopping center parking lot, apparently just after she had placed Andrea in her car seat.
Within 24 hours police arrested ex-convict Scott Johnson, 23, whose palm print, they said, had been found in the van. He faces the death penalty if convicted of murder and kidnapping. Bui he was not charged with carjacking, Middlesex County Prosecutor Robert Gluck says, since "the car was not the object of this guy's desires." The distinction, in most people's minds, is academic. "Should people be frightened now?" asks Piscataway Police Chief Pat LaRocca. "I tell my kids, 'Hey, make sure to lock your door.' Look at it this way: This happened once. It could happen again."
JOE TREEN
TOM NUGENT in Savage, VICKIE BANE in Englewood, JAMIE RENO in San Diego and CORY JOHNSON in Piscataway
- Contributors:
- Tom Nugent,
- Vickie Bane,
- Jamie Reno,
- Cory Johnson.
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