At around 2:00 AM local time on February 28, thieves managed to steal six Dodge Challenger Hellcats from Don Franklin Chrysler Dodge Jeep in Somerset, Kentucky, in under a minute. A recently released video from inside the showroom captured the crooks in action and revealed how quickly they got away with the muscle cars.
Four of the Hellcats were in the showroom. The other two were in the lot outside. The camera’s perspective only showed the theft of three of the vehicles in the building.
What made the cars so easy to steal from the dealer was that the keys were in the vehicles’ ignition, according to WKYT News. Plus, the thieves found the keys for the two Hellcats outside in the building.
At least for the vehicles inside, the thieves even thought to put temporary license plates on them to make the cars look legal on the road.
The dealer believes that someone with inside information might be involved in the crime because the crooks appeared to know how the security system worked.
“Once they tripped the alarm, it takes 60 seconds before it starts alerting. They were gone 20 seconds before the alarm started to go off. The response time of the police was like three minutes. It was really good,” dealership manager Adam Bryant told WKYT.
The theft eventually resulted in a high-speed police chase. About an hour after the crime, a Kentucky State Police trooper saw four of the Challengers going west on the state’s Cumberland Parkway. The drivers ran away at speeds as high as 180 miles per hour, which was fast enough for them to get out of the officer’s visual range. Cops from another county deployed spike strips and were able to disable one of the cars. The 19-year-old driver fled on foot, but the police caught and arrested him.
As of March 1, the police recovered five of the six Hellcats. One ran out of gas and was by the side of the road. Authorities found two others in Kentucky. A car was in Tennessee, and another was in Alabama. The cops believed the missing car was also in Alabama.
