Thieves targeted a woman working as an Uber Eats driver in D.C. and stole her work car and her personal car in the same day.
She got one of her cars back but it was riddled with bullet holes and full of shell casings. The other car is still gone.
The woman, who News4 is not identifying, was at Union Market in Northeast D.C. the morning of Nov. 17 when the Hyundai she used to drive for Uber Eats was stolen. The keys to her second car, a Lexus, were inside, along with something bearing her address.
“Within a matter of moments of time – about 10 to 15 minutes of them taking my Hyundai – they came to my home and got my second car,” she said.
Eleven days later, she received a letter from a towing company. Her Lexus had been found abandoned on a street in Capitol Heights and towed to an impound lot in Prince George’s County. The letter instructed her to come get her car and bring $463 for storage fees.
“I asked them, was my truck even driveable? Was it worth me even coming to get it? ‘Cause you think when your car gets stolen, it’s crashed up, damaged, you can’t drive it. So, they were like, ‘Well, we’ll talk to you when you get here with the $463,” she said.
When she got here, she saw bullet holes, “like they were shooting out of my vehicle.”
Inside the car, they found shell casings, drug paraphernalia and trash. Since the car had been stolen from D.C., she called D.C. police. She said a detective came and processed the car, took prints and collected the shell casings.
She didn’t want to drive the car anymore and felt like she would be driving around in a crime scene. She imagined getting pulled over in a car with bullet holes and having nothing more than a towing receipt to explain why.
That didn’t happen, but she had one more interaction with police.
‘They came out and took our DNA to exclude us from the crime, ‘cause that vehicle was reported in three other carjackings,” she said.
That’s where it all stands now: A D.C. driver has one bullet-riddled car she’s afraid to drive, her DNA on file to exclude her from an alleged crime spree and the car she used for work still gone.
“It has not been recovered yet,” she said.
