KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Apartment residents in the Northland want to know who’s stealing their gas.
Kansas City police are investigating a series of gas thefts from trucks and SUV’s at Northland apartments.
Police say the crooks are drilling into gas tanks, allowing them to easily steal expensive gasoline.
It’s been a rude awakening for tenants at apartment buildings like this one on Boardwalk Avenue. Truck and SUV owners are awakening each morning to find holes drilled in their gas tanks, and all the gas stolen too.
Josh Curtis and Ervin Wilmes say within the past week, they’ve walked out of their apartment homes to find they’d been ripped off.
“He’s like, ‘what are you doing? Stealing gas?'” said Curtis about what he remembers his neighbor shouting on Wednesday morning, just before the accused thief drove away.
Curtis says a neighbor knocked at his door Wednesday morning before 6 a.m. to tell him there was a man underneath his pickup truck, who even left his plastic bucket he was using to carry the gas away.
“A guy was drilling a hole into my gas tank and was stealing my gas,” Curtis said.
Wilmes says the same thing happened to him last week, and police reports prove it. He snapped a few cell phone photos of the damage done to his pickup, which he took to a nearby dealer for repairs.
“(The mechanic) said ‘your tank is on order, and it will be here on Monday, but there’s been four more since yours’,” Wilmes said.
And just up Interstate 29, Scott Spencer is busy helping truck owners get repairs. He’s the service department foreman at Thoroughbred Ford.
“We’ve had probably 14 of them come in so far with punched tanks,” Spencer said, counting the damaged gas tanks he’s seen in the past three weeks.
FOX 4 News talked briefly with an on-site manager at the Northland Passage Apartments, which are owned by Lincoln Property Management. The man identified himself only as “Jake” and wouldn’t say whether or not his company was addressing these thefts.
Kansas City, Mo. police can’t confirm the number of gas tank thefts they’re working, or if they have any suspects.
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