‘I was very surprised': Local victim gets back more than just stolen car

Yahoo

14-02-2025

If your car is stolen, you may just get it back with more than you bargained for.
More than 26,000 cars were stolen in Washington last year according to the Puget Sound Auto Theft Task Force, and if their owners are fortunate enough to get them back, they're often saddled with a time-consuming new problem: they need to clean up and clean out their vehicle.
It happened to Alaina Nieto. Her car was stolen for the second time in January. When she got it back, Nieto said police called and told her the car was at an impound lot.
It was packed with items that weren't hers.
'Garbage bags of clothes and toilet paper and just tools and random things,' she said. 'What wasn't in the car? There was a ton.'
So what do you do?
'We had called the non-emergency line and asked, 'What do we do with this stuff?'' she said. 'And they just kind of said, 'That's up to you.''
'Were you surprised?' KIRO 7 reporter Linzi Sheldon asked.
'I was very surprised,' Nieto said. 'I felt like maybe more care should be put into getting other people reunited with their stuff.'
Nieto found a hand torch. An iPod Touch. Dozens of tools. And even Christmas ornaments.
A lot of people would've just thrown it all out. But Nieto sorted through it and found a flute with a local public school sticker on it. She managed to track down the owner through social media.
And then a blue velvet bag caught her eye. Inside: a paw print and a small bag of cat fur.
She knew it was important. We'll get back to that in a bit.
Getting a car back full of random items happens a lot more often than you might think.
KIRO 7 connected with Nieto through a Facebook page called PNW Stolen Cars. It has over 150,000 members and when KIRO 7 reporter Linzi Sheldon posted to ask about people's experiences in situations like this, she received more than two hundred responses.
One man found a machete. He said the police told him he could keep it.
One woman said deputies told her a drill wasn't reported stolen, so it was hers.
And another woman found three extra laptops left in her car, even after she told officers they weren't hers.
'If I'm investigating that, that would more than likely tell me that those are stolen,' King County Sheriff's Office Detective Mike Ramirez said of the laptops case. 'So I would seize them temporarily and try to see if I could find the owner by serial number.'
KIRO 7 met up with Detective Ramirez at Banker's impound lot in Renton. He works for Covington Police through their contract with the Sheriff's Office.
So what exactly is the policy?
What are your rights and what steps should you take if you get your car back with strangers' valuable stuff still inside?
'Do I call police and say, 'Hey, these things are not mine? You might have thought they were mine. Can you take them off my hands and reunite them with their owners?'' Sheldon asked.
'If you don't want it, we take it,' Ramirez said. 'We store it. And, you know, at some point, whatever happens to it, it'll stay in storage for years. And then we figure out what we do with it later on. We have our policies. Every department has a policy, what they do with property.'
Unfortunately, for items that aren't worth much, that are hard to trace back to an owner, or things like garbage and other messes, it's up to the car's owner or insurance company to clean out.
'The residue of fentanyl stays, it lingers and it sticks to the surface,' Ramirez said.
And what if you find and turn on something like a cell phone that has GPS tracking?
'All of a sudden somebody comes knocking at your door, [saying,] 'Hey, you have my phone!' 'Oh yeah, I found it in the car.' Technically, you're in possession of stolen property, right?' Ramirez said.
He said in a case like this, there's an obvious paper trail, like a police report.
'You have an explanation as to what happened,' he said.
Despite all the cleanup Nieto had to do, she wasn't going to throw out that blue velvet bag.
'So there was a barcode,' she said. 'And I called the animal hospital and I just said the pet name on it.'
Emma Loomis. Emma, the cat.
The vet connected her with Kristina Loomis, who told KIRO 7 that Emma was particularly special to her daughter, Sabrina.
'I immediately broke out in tears,' Loomis said. '[Sabrina] had requested to have her paw print to remember her by.'
When Sabrina's car was broken into, they thought they had lost this last piece of Emma forever.
'To get this phone call out of the blue. It was amazing,' Loomis said. 'She didn't have to call us. She didn't have to track us down… but she went the extra mile to make sure that they got back to us.'
Nieto said she did it because she knows what it feels like to be a victim.
'It messes with your sense of security,' she said. 'It makes you feel violated. And I just wanted to help anyone who I could.'
So what about other departments' policies?
Seattle Police said they seize evidence, but sometimes officers don't know what belongs to the owner and what is stolen. If you find valuable items, you have to advocate for yourself and tell officers to come pick them up.
The Pierce County Sheriff's Office said owners often tell them about found property and they'll book it for safekeeping as they try to track down the owners.
Everett Police said they really try to talk to the car's owner as soon as they find it abandoned. That way they know what items to take to try to return them.
In all three cases, departments said they look to seize evidence and anything that might be stolen but may need people to speak up if they find a valuable item—especially one with a serial number—that can be traced back to its owner.