Bad Times - Truck Stolen and Trashed (Summer 1990)

There's quite a story on how this went down, I'll try to summarize the best I can.

Saturday about 1:00 in morning watching TV in front room of Girl Friends house and I hear my truck start up, I run outside and see my truck backing down the driveway. I stupidly but instinctively jump on the back of it (oh and I have no shoes on), GF is screaming bloody murder. We take off down the road with me on the back holding onto the roll bar, then they try to drive under some low trees to try to get me off the back. We drive by a party going on in someone's front yard so I yell "help they're stealing my truck" like some sort of drunk idiot on the back of a pickup truck lol.(or that's how I imagined I appeared to the partiers) but someone did believe and jumped in their vehicle and followed us but these thieves had a "follow" vehicle which blocked the nice guy as we did a fishtail in a cul-de-sac and then shot through someone's front yard. By this time we lost the follow vehicle as well. The thieves then stopped my truck on a dark neighborhood street and got out, one with a screw driver and another with a pipe wrench. They were yelling to get off the truck but of coarse I didn't want to get off MY truck. Anyways some wrestling/fighting ensued as I tried to get back into my truck and take off but that didn't work out so good, 1. I didn't have my keys and 2. they ripped out the ignition switch. Well more wrestling went on and we ended up bending my drivers door completely open so the door touched the fender. then as we moved back towards the rear of the truck one of the thieves got back in, started it and started leaving and at this time the other guy jumps on the back and they took off into the night as I'm standing in the middle of some dark street with bare feet wondering what the heck to do now.(this is before cell phones obviously) I forced myself to approach a house (at about 1:30 in the morning remind you) that looked like there was a light on. I knocked and they answered the door! I couldn't believe it. I explained my crazy situation and they were kind enough to let me use their phone. I believe I called my GF first which she had already called the police and needed my location which I had to ask the nice people where in the world I was lol. Anyways police showed up, I explained everything, and they went and did their thing. I then went cruising around the town with my Dad on the off chance we might spot it (which we didn't) but we had some nice bonding moments driving through some shady parts of town :-). Well the Police found it about 6:00am looking like this:

The dent in the fender is from them ripping the battery out and smashing it on the fender ( I think they did this out of frustration because I had an Amp Meter in the dash directly connected to the battery and as they were stealing the dash the sparks must have been flying because it looked like someone was doing some welding on the metal bar that runs across the inner dash lol)

Also that is battery acid on the fender, tire and my nice aluminum wheel.

You can see how the door bent the fender from opening way too far :-)

Why did they steal my shift knob!?