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Car cannibals stripped my vehicle bare twice...cops are powerless
Express & Star
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20/03/2025
This is the shocking moment a brazen ‘car cannibal’ walked off with a stolen bumper after a dad’s motor was attacked for the second time.
Jeremy Merckel woke up to discover his beloved Volkswagen Golf GTI had been stripped for parts outside his home.
Thieves had torn the bumper, headlights, windscreen wipers, grille and even the bonnet off his £17,000 motor.
Category
🚗
Motor
Transcript
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00:00
My name's Jeremy Merkle, I'm the owner of a Volkswagen Golf which has been what they call car cannibalised for the second time.
00:07
Last week I woke up to a message from a neighbour saying,
00:10
Jez I'm really sorry but your car's been done again.
00:13
I went outside, it was parked just a couple of doors up the road
00:17
and the entire front end of it essentially had been stolen.
00:23
If you think about it from the windscreen forward, all the body work had been taken overnight.
00:28
Trying to wake up and then you are just going, not again, because it's happened once before.
00:35
So yeah, it was a pretty depressing sight that just made me feel really angry.
00:39
I stood and stared at it for five minutes because I couldn't believe it had just happened again.
00:44
The first thing I did actually was put a message out on the neighbour's WhatsApp group,
00:48
partly because I wanted them to be aware and partly if anyone had seen or heard anything.
00:52
One of the first things that came through is one of the guys a few doors down checked his ring doorbell footage
00:57
and there is a video and it is, I'm laughing because it's quite amazing,
01:01
but there's a video at 4.12 in the morning of a guy walking down the road with the bumper over his head,
01:07
just casually wandering down the road with a massive piece of car above his head and it's just unbelievable.
01:13
And then it was just a case of getting the insurance involved and reporting it to the police.
01:17
There's just not a huge amount you can do, it's a really tough one.
01:20
Last time it happened I simply got, I registered it online and I got a crime number back almost immediately.
01:27
There was no, you know, there was no contact or anything.
01:32
This time I have to say the police, they have taken it really seriously.
01:35
They've been around and taken statements.
01:37
They've gathered some of the doorbell footage that the neighbours have got.
01:42
You know, I know they've gone and knocked on doors and asked some questions.
01:45
So we've had quite a lot of vehicle crime around here unfortunately.
01:49
So we all have steering locks now.
01:51
You know, if you look at my car and the neighbours' cars, most of them have got steering locks.
01:56
We've got alarms.
01:57
But you can't lock the bonnet to the car, you can't lock a bumper to the car.
02:03
And it just strikes me that, I don't know how they do it, but they can just strip a car in minutes.
02:11
Literally minutes that it's often, it's often they're done.
02:15
I think this problem does seem to be really prevalent in Birmingham.
02:18
I don't know why Birmingham in particular is copying it.
02:20
I've got friends around the country and so on who've literally never heard of this as a problem.
02:24
We're really startled yet.
02:26
I know of, I mean I've been, I've had it twice.
02:30
I know of at least two neighbours and other cars locally that have been done in the last couple of years.
02:38
And since my story's been out, I've had a number of people get in touch,
02:42
other people in Sutton who've also been a victim of this.
02:45
But people outside of the area, they don't seem to know about it.
02:49
It doesn't seem to be something.
02:51
It does feel like it's quite a problem in Birmingham.
02:54
And I don't know why that is, but there's clearly somebody who's got quite a nice business running,
03:00
repairing cars with stolen parts.
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