Car stripped 200m from owners home in rochfortbridge

A Rochfortbridge motorist has been left counting the cost after brazen thieves stripped his BMW of anything they could sell just yards from his front door.

On Wednesday morning of last week, April 22, Air Corps mechanic James Kenny woke to find his car a short distance from his home in the Rahanine estate in Rochfortbridge.

“The car was taken from the front driveway and brought 200 metres down the road. It was stripped of anything they could sell. The car was sitting on the brake discs. They took all the lights. It was a pretty high spec car and the inside was also stripped out, they took the central console which had a sat-nav and a DVD player,” an angry James told the Westmeath Examiner.

 From marks on his front door, James says that it appears that the thieves had tried to gain entry to his home to get the keys of the car but when they were unable to do so, they focused their attention on getting what they could, including a selection of tools that were in the boot.

“They didn’t manage to physically start the car but they took the handbrake off and pushed it down the road. I’m only coming to terms with the amount taken tool-wise, it’s stuff I collected over the years. It’s very annoying. We have two young children, a three-year-old and a six-year-old. It was heartbreaking for them to see me and my pregnant wife upset.”

 James believes that whoever stripped his car had “intimate knowledge” of what they were doing and they must have worked quickly as none of his neighbours saw anything.

“They would have need at least one professional person. They actually unbolted everything and certainly have done it before. Generally a car just disappears and is stripped elsewhere. Because they couldn’t take it they obviously had to get something out of the night’s venture.

“Not a single person saw anything. We have a dog ourselves and you’ll know when the postman’s coming as the dog will bark, but on that night the dog didn’t bark. Even the house where the car ended up outside of, they have dogs and they didn’t hear anything either. The dogs weren’t barking the next day either. Do these guys sedate the dogs to make them quiet?”

Describing last Tuesday night’s crime as “very unusual”, crime prevention officer for Westmeath, Sgt John Connolly, said the manner in which the car was stripped indicates that a professional was involved.

“I haven’t seen something like that before, the way the car was pushed down the driveway. We have increased patrols in the general area as we are conscious of people taking parts off cars.