Pay oof

[soapy]

Last week I arrived at a wash and found a guy in his car sleeping in one of the SS bays. I pulled out my phone and took pictures of the front and back of his car with him sleeping in it. Then I went up and pounded on the window surprising him and waking him up. It took him a while to find his key but he evenually left. One week later on the news I see a similar car had robbed a Cstore at gun point. The pictures was poor quality and no plates. I forwarded the good pictures I had with the plates and they picked the guy up later that day.

 

[I.B. Washincars]

Good job Soapy. I don't know how many license plate #s I have written down, when something just didn't look right. I've been asked why I did it when they weren't doing anything wrong, often being scrutinized as if I was doing something wrong. I explain that if I'm wondering what they are up to, they may have had sinister actions in mind had I not been there, and if I find that something bad happened during the night I would instruct the police to look at them first. Nothing happens, no harm, no foul. I always get quite irritated when I hear someone say "I wondered what he was up to..." and when asked for the tag # I hear "I didn't get it."...

On a side note, I was at the c-store down the street, when an attractive, nicely dressed, woman was wanting to cash a check. She instructed the clerk that she was related to the "Johnsons", a very prominent family in that small town. Also, that would be a very prominent name in the phone book at any pay phone (this was a while back). From where I was standing, I could see her car with Illinois plates (nearly 200 miles away at closest point), and memorized the # until I could write it down. The clerk refused to cash the check and they left. Lo and behold, a few days later I read in the local paper of a bunch of cold checks being passed, and fitting the description of the woman and car. I still had the # written on something in my truck and passed it along to law enforcement. I never heard how it turned out.

 

[MEP001]

I have a long list of plate numbers along with the make/model of the vehicle and what I observed, anything from abusing the changer to an obvious drug deal. So far the only time I've needed the info was when a woman had her purse snatched - I had seen the car driving through slowly and it just really looked sketchy. I was able to give the cops the info immediately and they caught them within a minute of that. Between the video and getting them caught so fast with the evidence, the guy pleaded guilty to three separate felonies for which he would spend a minimum of 26 years in prison with no chance of parole (It was that harsh because when he grabbed the purse a 16 year old girl tried to stop him and he yanked her to the ground where she sprained her wrist, injury to a minor during the commission of a felony).

 

[Ghetto Wash]

I took a pic of a guys plate because he had a carwash vacuum in the back of his truck. A year later there was a guy drilling safes at all the local car washes (mine included). When robbing safes, he had his plate covered up so no one could track him down. My phone was running out of memory so I was deleting pictures and came across the pic of the truck with the vacuum. I was able to correlate specific scratches on his tailgate between my pic a year prior and the security video of him drilling safes. Cops picked him up within a week.