Hell on Wheels

By NANCY GIBBS

Every 19 seconds a car is stolen. Every day about 70 automobiles are carjacked. But it is not statistics that make people tuck the Mace into the glove compartment, or change their route home from work, or discover the virtues of carpooling, or prefer the risk of a ticket to stopping at red lights in a bad part of town. It is the stories, not the statistics, that breed fear.

Every place has at least one crime that makes it shudder. Maryland had the Pamela Basu case, in which the young woman in a gold BMW was dragged to her death trying to save her baby daughter when thieves drove off in her car. Los Angeles mourned Sherri Foreman, 29, a pregnant beautician who was stabbed by a carjacker when she stopped her 1984 BMW at an automated-teller machine. By the time the ambulance reached the hospital, the 12-week-old fetus was dead. A day later, so was the mother.

Detroit pretty much invented carjacking, so its police force has had the most practice in fighting it. They've spent the past three months trying to find the killer of Mark Rayner, a 255-lb. National Golden Gloves heavyweight champ, who was carjacked for his new white Jeep Grand Cherokee when he stopped at a phone booth on his way home from a movie. When he tried to escape by driving off, the thugs opened fire. At least five bullets hit the side of his Jeep; two hit Rayner in the back, killing him instantly.

On July 17 in Pine Hills, Florida, Philip Chandler, 16, emerged from a local barbershop and was about to drive off in his parents' 1986 Ford Mustang when he was accosted by two teenagers, forced into the car's trunk and taken along for a long joyride. Five hours later, Chandler was found in a parking lot 30 miles away, suffering from dehydration and comatose from the 130 degrees heat in the trunk. After two weeks he regained some consciousness, but doctors fear he may have suffered irreversible brain damage. "He wasn't in the wrong place at the wrong time," said Orange County Sheriff's Sergeant Mike Easton. "He was doing what any one of us would be doing on a Saturday morning -- taking care of errands."

Carjacking is not a new crime, nor is it yet a routine one. But the fear of it is growing exponentially and in the process changing the way America drives. The FBI estimates that there were 25,000 carjackings last year, up an alarming 25% from the year before. That is still only a tiny fraction of the 1.6 million annual car thefts, but when combined with other incidents in which cars have become both weapons and targets -- the drive-by shootings in Washington or the cinder blocks dropped off highway overpasses in Detroit -- it leaves an impression of rolling danger that fuels a kind of hysteria. "Our agents say there's real fear on the streets," says Howard Apple, head of the FBI's interstate theft unit. "Some crimes you can avoid by avoiding high-crime areas, but people are getting carjacked in their own driveways. People are scared enough that they are not driving alone."

The fear may have more to do with the violation of expectations than with the threat itself. "People know they could be killed in an auto accident, so when they get into their cars, they aren't afraid of the 45,000 people getting killed on the highways," says Lawrence W. Sherman, professor of criminology at the University of Maryland. "But they don't expect to be attacked by criminals when they are in their cars; that's why the criminal attacks engender much more fear."

Among the shattered expectations are notions about where crime happens, and to whom. While young men in the inner cities are by far the most likely group to be the victims of violent crimes, carjackers have begun recently to target women, the elderly, tourists -- the conspicuously vulnerable. And they hit in places that were supposed to be off limits. In big cities, soaked with drugs and guns, residents make certain concessions to safety. They learn what streets to avoid at night, what neighborhoods to avoid at all times, what activities to avoid at all costs. But now the generation that fled the cities to escape violent crime finds that crime commutes too.

The auto model makes no difference in the cases where the thief is after the driver's belongings more than the car. "The consensus would be that carjacking is a crime of opportunity," says Charlie J. Parsons, special agent in charge of the Los Angeles office of the FBI. "Most of them occur within 15 seconds, and it's not a situation where the perpetrator stakes out the victim for several days and plans the crime. They're standing on a street corner, and there's someone with the windows down, and they're vulnerable, and bam! -- it happens."

Out of each famous case has come an official spasm. The Basu case prompted Congress to classify carjacking as a federal crime with a prison sentence of at least 15 years, and a life sentence if the victim dies. One of the two men involved in the Basu carjacking has been sentenced to life; the other is on trial and may receive capital punishment.

The murder of a German tourist in April sent out global shock waves -- and sent Florida officials scrambling to shore up their image as the Sunshine | State. Driving in from the airport in an Alamo rental car, Barbara Meller- Jensen had taken the wrong turn and ended up in one of Miami's poorer neighborhoods. When she felt her car hit from behind, she got out to see what had happened. Then, as her six-year-old son watched, thieves beat her, robbed her, climbed back into their car, gunned their engine and drove over her head. To counter the impression that renting a car is an invitation to violence, the Florida legislature has outlawed license plates as well as company logos that mark cars as rented or leased. It is not only that visitors are more likely to get lost and wind up in the wrong neighborhood. They are also assumed to be carrying more cash -- and to be less likely to come back and testify if they are robbed. "When one officer asked a kid about his new Nike Air Jordan tennis shoes," says Miami police sergeant Clay Camil, "he remarked, 'Oh, a tourist bought those.' "

But no one is immune -- not even the police. A Glendale, California, police detective was leaving work one night last year when he was jumped in the police parking lot by four men, one with a shotgun. They said they wanted his car and ordered him into the trunk. The detective broke away and leaped over the railing of the police parking structure, falling one story below as the carjackers fired at him. He wasn't hit, but he suffered lacerations to his forehead in the fall. Says Randy Ballin, head of the California Highway Patrol's Los Angeles auto-theft unit, who investigated the case: "These people don't care who you are. They don't care that you are a cop and may be armed. They have nothing to lose. The criminal-justice system is not a deterrent. It's a minor inconvenience."

The thieves and the cops agree on this: the chances of going to jail for stealing a car are still very, very small. Federal laws apply only to the most violent crimes by hardened career criminals -- and local rules are deficient. Under California law, for example, first offenders typically receive probation; second offenders often get as little as 16 months and serve just half of that. Other states are rarely more severe on the mostly young first- timers. "Recently they've been putting them in a youth house for a couple of days, then they're released pending trial," says Captain Richard Fanning, commander of the Newark, New Jersey, police department's special projects target team. "They seem to get a lot of bites out of the apple before they do one single minute of incarcerated time."

While the overall arrest rate of car thieves was just 13.9% nationally in 1991, down from 14.6% in 1990, the recovery rate for the stolen cars is high. That is one reason why police officers urge victims to give up their cars without a fight; in Los Angeles County, 9 out of 10 cars are recovered within two weeks of the theft. "I like to tell people, 'Fall in love with your life, not your car. The car can be replaced.' " says Parsons of the FBI. "It's just not a smart move to go up against some 16-year-old kid with an automatic weapon. And chances are, your car is going to be recovered."

Carjackings are not the only car crimes that have exploded over the past few years. What police call smash-and-grabs are also considered easy, risk-free crimes. A swing of a baseball bat probably won't shatter a car window, but the impact of a porcelain spark plug will. "People are shocked, because they don't see a weapon. These guys don't have to use a bat. Some even carry the porcelain piece around in their mouths," says Miami's Sergeant Camil. "There you are, daydreaming about dinner. You're not expecting a brick or a spark plug through the window," says Miami Police Department spokesman Angelo Bitsis. "If you were walking on the street and somebody was following you and staring at your bag, you know to prepare yourself. But in smash-and-grabs, the window is smashed, there's a hand in your car, your purse is gone and five seconds has elapsed."

Meanwhile, conventional car theft has been exploding too. The motives tend to vary from city to city. Newark has a serious problem with joyriders, usually teenagers, who steal cars and perform "doughnuts," in which they lock the brakes, step on the gas, and send the car spinning in circles. Some do it in front of police cars, in the hopes of inspiring a chase. One night last November, three kids stole a new Honda, drove across a side street, hit a bump in the road, took off, sheared a power pole in half, took another pole out and brought the electric lines down on top of them, and all three burned to death. "When you try to pry these kids out of these cars and see people get run over by them," asks Captain Fanning, "what the hell joy does anybody see in it?"

In other major cities, the motive is largely commercial. Police say more than half of the thefts are committed by organized car rings that chop up stolen cars and resell the parts or ship them across borders. (See following story.) Overall, about a quarter of stolen cars end up in chop shops, where they are taken apart and resold for as much as triple their value whole. Two skilled choppers with power tools can cut up a car from hood to trunk in three minutes. The demand is huge: a thief can steal a $10,000 Nissan Sentra, strip it and sell the parts for $20,000 to $25,000. While luxury cars are always tempting, among the most popular cars to steal, according to the National Insurance Crime Bureau, are: the Pontiac Firebird, Chevrolet Camaro, Mitsubishi Starion, Toyota MR2 and Chrysler Conquest.

The explosion in car theft, and even more the fear of it, has inspired an army of entrepreneurs eager to cash in on what has become a $500 million to $600 million annual security business. As many as 90% of the luxury cars sold in California are equipped with antitheft devices either in the factory or at the dealership. There are glass sensors, tiny microphones that set off an alarm if they pick up the tinkling of broken glass. Motion sensors and shock sensors go off if the car is jolted or bounced. Clifford Electronics Inc. offers a remote-triggering device that shuts off the car's electronics, so that when a carjacker gets a block or so away from the carjacking scene, the owner can hit a transmitter and stop the car dead. Among the newer devices on the market are electronic tracking systems like LoJack and Teletrac, which cost between $500 and $750 and allow police to track stolen vehicles with an electronic signal. But thieves have already come up with devices that can detect whether a car is sending out a tracking signal, allowing them to pass up such cars or locate the tracking device and disarm it.

The safety tips that police officers provide drivers would sound uselessly obvious, were it not for the fact that people ignore them all the time. Keep a distance between cars, they advise. Avoid unfamiliar neighborhoods. Try to avoid the lane next to the curb. Don't leave the car running when you dash into the convenience store. Lock the doors. Keep purses and wallets out of view. "No. 1, be aware," says the FBI's Apple. "In this day and age, it's not safe to unroll your window -- even to give people money at Christmas."

In this century, the car has been a measure of American freedom. Put a key in the ignition and a foot to the pedal, and the country is suddenly open to personal exploration. It is self-expression through mobility -- with each mile on the odometer an expansion of one's liberty. But as car crime turns violent, it scratches the nerves of Americans who thought they were safe in their sheet-metal wombs. The crime wave orders them to stay home and lock the doors, with no place to run, because the roads are not safe. The brakes are on the imagination. Freedom's vehicle has become a ride into a wild frontier.

With reporting by Cathy Booth/Miami, Ratu Kamlani/ New York, Sylvester Monroe/Los Angeles and Joseph R. Szczesny/Detroit