After my car was stolen

When my car wasn't where I'd left it, all I knew was it had been stolen. I imagined some junkie driving to his dealer's house, maybe passing out in my car later, pissing himself all over the front seat. This had happened to my friend's car. Or perhaps some crack dealer needed it to transport product across state lines. I'd read about that in the news. Or maybe some thoughtless kids had taken it for a joy ride, whipping over curbs and leaving a burned out hull of a Honda Civic in the woods. That's what happened to my mother's Karmen Ghia 35 years before. No doubt they were laughing as they warmed their hands on the toxic fire.

When the police called a week later to tell me my car had been recovered all I knew was that three juveniles had been arrested while driving it around south Seattle. They had been pulled over in an orderly traffic stop and arrested without incident. So it was the kids, only they hadn't had time to take my car out in the woods to burn it. I imagined three white boys with blond crew cuts and letter jackets high-fiving each other as they drove off in my car. Driving away from the 7-11 after using fake ID to buy a case of beer. I imagined three black kids wearing watch caps, fist-bumping each other as they drove away in my car, driving away from the 7-11 after ditching class in favor of finding someone over 21 to buy them a case of beer.

When I called six months later to find out where the prosecution was I found out the case had been lost in transition on its way to juvenile court. I also found out the two passengers had been 13 and the driver was 12 at the time of the theft. He had needed to sit on a phone book to see over the steering wheel, the officer told me. It was also explained to me that these particular kids had been caught and charged several times with "taking a motor vehicle without permission." That they were too young to be considered full fledged gang members but they worked for the gang by stealing cars since the punishment for juvenile car thieves is so much lighter than for adults.

When I picked my car up from impound The steering column has been stripped of casing to allow easier access to the ignition wires. A hole gaped where the stereo had lived. All of my belongings had been thrown from the car, except for one postcard with an areal photo of the impossibly yellow and blue Grand Prismatic hot spring in Yellowstone. There was no phone book.

When I attended the sentencing hearing of the boy who had been the backseat passenger I found out he was Laotian, as were all three boys. His mother was there, in tears. Through her interpreter she pleaded for us all to see the good in her son, lamented that he had fallen in with a bad crowd of young Laotian immigrants. When the judge allowed me to present my impact statement, I found the sweat from my down-turned palm had puddled on the table.

All three boys pleaded guilty to their charges. The clerk at the Victims' Advocate office told me it was very rare for juvenile car thieves to plead guilty because it was so easy for them to get off. Curious, I looked them up. I found the front seat passenger had recently gotten detention at his junior high school for turning in his homework late. His school was one I drove past occasionally. The driver, twelve years old when he had taken my car, had pleaded guilty as he was waiting trial for another crime. While the charging papers from my car theft had gotten lost in the shuffle, the alleged driver had been involved in a snowball fight--just two months after he had been arrested for stealing my car. The snowball fight turned ugly when the opponents used snowballs weighted with rocks to break a window of the boy's house. The boy took his father's rifle and shot at the kids in the street. One of those kids, seventeen years old, died of a gunshot wound to the head.