Police Auction...

So, I still haven't bought a truck.  I've gone and looked at some, but just haven't found anything I wanted to buy.  Mike Forsberg was kind enough to go look at this '89 Ranger for me out in Clarkston, and report back to me so that I didn't have to drive up there.  I feel a little iffy about it, but I think I'm probably going to buy it.  I just can't wait around anymore looking for the perfect deal.  I mean, I think that my hesitation so far has even been more about hesitation itself than about the trucks.  Probably better to just bite the bullet.  I keep trying to tell myself that the trucks I've looked at have only cost a fraction of what I paid for my motorcycle, so I shouldn't be so uptight.  But I'm still me, so what can you do.

Anyway, I went out to the salvage auction again today and looked at a couple of trucks.  There was a bright orange '89 F150 that I thought about bidding on, but when I got out there I found that if they'd had a key for it, it was now lost, and that the doors and hood were locked, and that the passenger side door didn't even have key mechanism in it.  So I looked at the undercarriage and it all seemed to be there, with about the amount of rust you'd expect for an '89.  Maybe a little bit more.  Oh well.

Then  I went out to the police auction, which starts after the viewing on the salvage auction, but before the bidding.  I was worried that they would charge for registration at the police auction, but they didn't.  You just had to show your driver's licence and they gave you a number.

The police auction was full of interesting characters.  Mostly they were hispanic men dressed in cheap flashy clothes.  There were even portions of hard, angry looking guys and jovial smilers among them.  Later it became apparent that the smilers were dangerous in the bidding.  A couple of them would start bidding after it got down to two guys fighting up the price, then one dropped out.  The winner of that first combat would have relief written all over him, and it would be going once, going twice, then one or two of the smilers would bid it up $20 more.  The guy would look stunned, then keep bidding.  The smilers would laugh, and read the other bidder's expression, then let him get it, after a few more jumps.

There was one smiler though who was doing it and unexpectedly won the truck I'd initially been interested in.  He grinned ruefully as he walked up to the shed, and his buddies all laughed at him.  I laughed a little too.  He seemed like a happy guy.  I'd spoken to the auctioneer earlier and he said these two or three guys would drive it up for fun like that and every once in a while they got stuck with something, and would just sell it on later at a small loss.  They were there every week.

There were also a couple of guys I think were Armenian.  At least I overheard someone say that they were.  I guess they were regulars too, and were pretty close dealers.  They stood together and bid viciously, looking furiously at the auctioneer and no one else as they stabbed their placards up in bidding wars.  They bid on two late '90's Chevy Impalas, and won one of them.  They left after getting their claim ticket.

Then there were a few white trash guys, who weren't together, but strangely all had women with them.  Both male and female they looked like methheads, bodies about 40 years older than their age.  The guys were all bald ontop, but had long greasy or frizzy strings of hair down around their shoulders.  And invariably, the women wore taktops and sweatpants and the men wore tshirts with the sleeves cut off.  And they were all sunburned.

And there were a couple of other white guys, young and it looked like half-way hipsters.  They were both goofy, but not in that way that has been embraced by the hipsters, rather just regular goofy.  They had spotted faces and their grins were guileless.  One of them won one of the Impalas after a bidding war with the Armenians that took the price over a thousand dollars.

There was a slick looking black fellow in a silk tshirt who lost the first lot, a huge '70's cabin cruiser boat with faded Nevada tags, to a fat old white fellow who looked a little bewildered at the end of their bidding war.  He looked like a first timer too.  Someone's grandpa who had somehow seen this boat and fallen for it.  The black fellow was bidding for a third party on the telephone, and both he and the old guy went higher and higher.  Everyone else dropped our around $450, but those two went on in $20 increments up to $1680.  When the black fellow ran out of juice he frowned with one side of his mouth and shrugged, then said goodbye to whomever was on the other side of his phone.  The old man was wearing a fleece sweater with a picture of forest, mountains and a sliver moon on a snowy night.  I don't think he entirely believed what he'd just done.

The belle of the ball though was this truck.  It was a '99 Mazda truck, a 4 cylinder manual.  Pretty much just was I'd have liked to buy.  It looks pretty good in the picture, but the description said it had been impounded as evidence.  That might mean that someone had stolen it and gotten caught, but the owner didn't claim it after, or... something else.

Turns out, this time it was something else.  You can't really see it from the picture, but in person the something else became obvious.  That scuff in the racing stripe is a bullet hole.  There are three more in the windshield.  The rear window and the passenger's window are both broken out, and the they are sealed up with plastic that is peppered with stickers that warn of biohazard.  The bed was also sealed with plastic, with the stickers.  It seems that bits of scalp, skull, brains and blood were dried up in there.  There was dried blood on the seat backs, and a large, rumpled piece of butcher's paper covered the bottom part of the driver's seat.  When I asked the cop walking around the lot about it, she said that was where most of the blood had pooled, and that the sphincters had gone in death, so there was feces and urine.

It all belonged to this girl.  Apparently, she and a girl friend had been on a spree of between 9 and 12 armed robberies all over the valley.  I guess it was mostly restaurants at the end of busy nights, and supermarkets.  Initially the police thought it was a guy and a girl, because this one went in and did the robberies while the other drove.  I guess she was kind of big, and she wore a disguise with a top hat, and Groucho Marx glasses, with the nose, eyebrows, and mustache   But in one of the later robberies witnesses identified her as a female when they heard her speak to a restaurant hostess.

She was killed when the police went to serve a warrant on her.  She jumped into the truck and tried to hit the officers.  Also, either she or the other girl had shot at a West Jordan officer at one of the last robberies when he got into a foot chase with her.  So when she went after the cop with the truck they just opened fire.  There were a few bullet holes in the back passenger's side too, and the truck had mashed into a parked car in the street after she'd been hit.  This happened over by Liberty Park.

Her partner was arrested at the Smith's on 8th south and 9th east I think, after having come from robbing another supermarket.  The cops called her on her cell phone and told her they knew where she was, and that they were coming to the store to get her.  She gave herself up.

The dead girl's father couldn't believe it.  He admitted she'd had a heroin problem years ago, but he thought she was clean, and had been for a long time.  She made a living painting murals, and was renting a house.  She played bass at their church services and taught sunday school.

Her mother had asked the other girl not to come around anymore in the old days, because she was still using after the dead girl had been arrested for heroin and had gone to rehab.  The dad didn't know that they'd been hanging out together again.

Kind of a sad story.  They were a few years older than me.

That grinning latino guy got the truck by accident for four hundred dollars.