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