Somebody Stole A Fully Wrapped Radio Station Vehicle
The company that we work for, Townsquare Media, has markets across the country, one of which is in Billings, Montana, which has a population of about 16,000 more than in Davenport. Still, their troubles with station vehicles are not far off from ours, which you can read more about below.
This week, one of the staff members, Josh Rath of Mix 97.1, said he got a photo from a friend of his station's vehicle about 20 miles from the station building.
"Honestly, I was somewhat surprised, but not shocked to see it off somewhere (assuming one of our fantastic account executives had it). Though, he mentioned it was honking at him and was just acting... strange," Rath said in his write-up.
The Mix 97.1 station vehicle is a well-marked, wrapped-in-pink 2022 Kia Sportage.
He said they didn't think much of it, because of the number of people in their building who could possibly have been driving it.
It wasn't until the station got a call from a woman at a church in Ballantine (about 25 minutes away from Billings), saying there was a strange-looking man walking around the car and kicking the tires. She said she already had called the police.
The suspect was arrested and then released because the jail in Billings is too full.
It still begged the question, how did this guy get the key to the vehicle?
"One particular elevator, that night, the locking mechanism for the 23rd floor just wasn’t working. So he was able to get all the way to the 23rd floor," said Josh Rath.
From there, the suspect happened to have a screwdriver on him that was just the right size to pop the lock on the backdoor to the office space.
The suspect got in, and found the key sitting on a desk. He took the key and a t-shirt on his way out of the radio station.
No damage was done to the vehicle except the suspect smoked cigarettes inside.
This year alone, we in the Townsquare Quad Cities building have had two station vehicles vandalized - the 97X truck earlier in the year and the I-Rock 93.5 truck, which just was vandalized this week.
The 97X truck had one of the two catalytic converters cut off of it, which is not the easiest thing to track down once it's turned into a scrapyard for money.
The I-Rock 93.5 truck had a shirtless man throw a large rock at it on Sunday night, damaging the hood, breaking the windshield, and landing on the hood of the truck.
Check out the video of the guy, chucking that massive rock like it's nothing: