HOUSTON — Security video at a gated west Houston townhome community showed thieves trying to make off with one of the residents' cars.
It happened very early Monday morning, and as the video shows, the auto theft wasn’t as easy as the would-be thieves had planned.
Morgan Mannen said she was woken up by the sound of her neighbor pounding on her front door at 7:30 a.m.
“So, I ran downstairs and he told me someone tried to steal my car and it was sitting at the entrance,” she said.
Sure enough, there it was.
Her Hyundai Elantra had been ditched by whoever was driving it. They also left behind some major damage.
“The whole steering column and everything,” Mannen said. “They hit a Dumpster as well. I just hope it’s not totaled.”
Security video showed two men entering the gated community in the middle of the night by jumping a fence.
“They were on the hunt," Mannen said.
Mannen said they looked over all the vehicles before settling on hers. They moved quickly before anyone found out what they were doing. Eventually, they were able to hotwire her car.
“Surveillance video shows them speeding through the whole time,” Mannen said. “Just trying to get out as quickly as they could.”
Luckily, nobody was leaving or returning home through the gates early Monday morning. The thieves were stuck inside Morgan’s car behind the locked gates. Ultimately, they ditched her car and bailed on their plan.
“Just across the street right here there was a report of about 10 cars being broken into, like, right before the video surveillance that we have here,” Mannen said.
She said police told her that trying to steal her car wasn’t the first bad thing the attempted thieves did early this morning. Her vehicle wasn’t the only one they had to abandon, either.
“They drove a stolen car in (the complex across the street),” she said. “And they couldn’t get it out.”
Mannen said there’s really not much else she could have done to prevent it from happening. She’s hopeful the thieves get caught so it doesn’t happen again.
“Cars getting broken into is kind of a common thing,” she said. “But cars being stolen? Not so common.”