Man sentenced in shooting of repo agent

[garyk/nm]

Wow! Lots of folks willing to accept the shooter's story, based on what? A very fact- and background-deficient news story and the shooter's own rambling diatribe.
Where is the other side of the story? Maybe the financing agency and the repo agent had already taken many steps to secure the collateral, but we haven't heard about any of that, have we?
Some folks get awfully possessive about "their" vehicles, when in fact, if you are making payments, it is NOT your vehicle!
I worked auto loan collections for several years after college, and have put out many a repo order. This is NOT taken lightly by the financing agency, as it is all too often a major loss to them. People who don't pay for "their" vehicles usually don't take very good care of them either; but they are quite adept at hiding them.
This guy didn't get himself in to the 220% high-risk catagory by just being late a few times; that special place is reserved for hardcore deadbeats with a strong history of stiffing the very folks who are dumb enough to lend them money. Likely a prior repo as well. (love to see HIS Bureau!)

Before we bag on the repo man for his tactics, consider that maybe, just maybe, he was aware that this guy was a hostile nut-case and was trying his best to avoid an unpleasant situation. As far as going on to private property to effect the repo, read your loan documents; you give them the right to do this when you sign up.

</rant>

 

[BigFatKen]

go back in time

quote:
If we are to believe the shooter, the repo man sneaked onto the property dressed in camo armed with a pistol! endquote

Suppose we back up in time and this is what you see:

You are about light a cigar when you notice A man sneaking onto your land dressed in camo. As you approach him, he draws a gun but you shoot first. It turns out he is a good guy or bad guy. Does it really make a difference?

Now, if you are a bail jumper, you have signed a paper that allows this. Does the contract of loan allow this?
Kevin Harris saw a man in camo or black shoot the family dog with a smg. Harris shot and killed him.

 

[HankB]

Lots of folks willing to accept the shooter's story, . . .

Sounds like the guy (and presumably, his attorney) adopted a defense of "I was shooting at the tires. That's my story and I'm sticking to it!"

When the prosecution couldn't prove in court it was untrue - I mean, unless the shooter said something otherwise, how could they prove his real intent? - the outcome was a natural result.

 

[Optical Serenity]

Fact of the matter is the loser shot at a person driving off. There is never a time this is ok. I'm not worried about it, this is the kind of low life that'll continue to break the law, and sooner or later he'll get what he has coming.

 

[a1abdj]

You are right. It does not matter. This is especially true when you are acting like a thief.

The repo man knows there are risks and chooses to do his job anyway that is in a manner where he can be easily taken for a burglar

I'm sure almost everybody here pays their bills, but here's how it goes down in Missouri where I was a repo agent.

YOU do not own the car. The car is not YOUR property until you pay it off. The vehicle you are driving essentially belongs to the lender. If you stop making payments on your car, you didn't legally steal it, but that's pretty much what it boils down to. The borrower may think the repo man is the thief, but in reality, the borrow is the true criminal.

I took some cars by knocking on doors. Most people out there are reasonable people and want to do the right thing. Some people are dirt bags. The dirt bags don't get the same treatment the good people do.

As a recovery agent, I have every legal right to come onto your property and take the bank's property with me when I leave. The borrower has NO RIGHT to shoot at me or even touch me for that matter. If a borrower wanted to do something stupid, then not only would I take the car, but I would have the police come take him to jail.

If the borrower wanted to hide the car, and the lender was willing to get a replevin order from a court, then the borrower could face arrest again.

Many deadbeats are professionals. They are smart enough to know that you can repo their car today, and they can go buy another one tomorrow. These types of people gave me very few problems.

These people who would shoot at somebody in the dark or want to get physical with the repo man should think twice, because when it's all said and done, they'll be in jail, paying big legal bills, or end up dead.

 

[Jon Coppenbarger]

I did that for around 10 years back in the 70's. Cars were easier to get back then as there were not as many locking steering wheels on them.
Over the course of events I had a friend that was shot to death trying to repo a truck in a rural area. The guy got clean away with it also. Claimed the repo guy came at him in the dark on private property in the mountains. Only one story and the shooter got to tell it.
Laws may of changed over the years but back then in CA we could go get it as long as it was not behind a locked gate or in a garage if it was opened or not. Pretty much everthing else including your drive way was fair game.

Myself and my partners got hurt or harrassed more on the they knew you were coming repos than on anything else.
Reason I liked to get them without them knowing if I could.
#1 I controlled the repo.
#2 You NEVER ever knew exactly what the hell they were told by the bank.
#3 things like batteries and good tires and anything else of value on many occasions ended up missing.
Plus others.

Did we ever press charges or sue someone over trying to hurt us or threaten us. NO we did not and after learning all it cost us. we only had the police arrest them but never pressed any charges.
Hey they did not have any money so how the hell was I going to get something out of them by suing them? On those I just jacked up the repo bills a little for my trouble. lets see I took 6 trips up there instead of one and the towing bill was higher and all those phones calls and ECT.
We had insurrance anyways. My partner was beat pretty good with a shovel one night on a voluntary repo. The guy had the car on jacks with the battery gone. Said it had been like that for months. Motor was still warm.
Yeah I have had many guns pulled on me and knives plus other things. Been thrown off of a few hoods also. You learn to get off before it picks up to much speed. LOL

Do I believe the guy shot at the tires? NO but try to prove other wise.
Made good money for the time when I was in my teens and early 20's. Enjoyed the adventure and had some good times. Yeah but I got out after one repo one time that was a voluntary repo.

went to get a car and a truck from the guy. He had lost his job , His wife was in a hospice dieing from cancer, He was losing his house, They had two small kids.
I was taking their car and truck , Nice guy and yeah I did my job but the next day I quit and never ever wanted to do that again to another person.
Yeah it was the banks cars but I had the choice of being the instrument of getting it back or not.

 

[BigFatKen]

quote

quote
a recovery agent, I have every legal right to come onto your property and take the bank's property with me when I leave. The borrower has NO RIGHT to shoot at me or even touch me for that matter. If a borrower wanted to do something stupid, then not only would I take the car, but I would have the police come take him to jail.
/quote

I always wanted to know this. It makes sense.
I don't see the quote button. I know we are running out of RAM. Is that the problem?

 

[Mauserguy]

OK, how do you go from 1st degree murder to a minor misdemeanor? Did somebody mess up on this one, or what?
Mauerguy

 

[lawson]

i worked as a repo agent for a while. the majority of the time we spoke to the people and informed them of the process.

sometimes, the people refused to talk to us, wouldn't answer phone calls, and after many attempts at contacting them, we would repo a vehicle without informing them.

and then there was the time i had to drive my partner and myself to the hospital because we were attacked by three guys with baseball bats and tire irons when trying to repo a car. they ran off when they saw my pistol, but my partner was already unconscious with pretty severe head trauma.

if he had died, he would have left a wife and two young children. we both retired from the repo business after that.

repo men aren't bad men, they aren't thieves. most of the time they are guys without higher education who assume certain risks to take care of their loved ones.

 

[pauli]

Right - shooting at the tires, hit the driver in the head. I can't tell you the number of times that's happened to me.

seriously. i mean, have you ever LOOKED at a tire on vehicle that's going somewhere? it's SPINNING AROUND! you try and keep a bead on it as it goes around, but you know, it's not easy to keep your aim from straying as you move the rifle in faster and faster circles. then, BOOM, you've shot the driver in the head. happens all the time.

 

[ExtremeDooty]

After my parent's divorce, I had to watch my mother deal with bill collectors and repo men. Being a victim of circumstance was not an acceptable excuse.

I have a high level of contempt and little sympathy for those that choose to make their living off the misery of others.

Some here sound like we should bring "Debtor's Prisons" back, since it seems that eveyone with financial problems are either criminals and/or scumbags.

 

[c_yeager]

Man tried to steal his car.He got what he deserved.justice was served.Besides nobody was seriously hurt.

Right, the shooter in this story had someone elses property in his possession and he refused to pay for it. It's just a shame that the man who went to recover this stolen property for its rightful owners had to get shot by a man who is both an attempted murderer and a deadbeat.

I have a high level of contempt and little sympathy for those that choose to make their living off the misery of others.

I have a high level of contempt and little sympathy for those that choose to believe that they dont have to pay their bills and that they remain entitled to things that refuse to pay for. If you borrow money from someone and then refuse to pay it back then that makes you a deadbeat, and they have every right in the world to get it back.

If you dont ever want to deal with this problem it is really simple, dont borrow other people's money.

 

[O.F.Fascist]

If you sneak around in the middle of the night like a thief and act like a thief, then you will probably be treated like a thief.

 

[EddieCoyle]

Wow. There are a lot of people here that have shared their experiences repo-ing cars (myself included). I'm sure it varies state-to-state but my experiences were way different that others here.

First of all, repo work is not lucrative. I did it for about 3 years starting when I was 18 and did it for spending money. We made about $50 per car and I had to split it with my brother (or he had to split it with me. Someone had to drive you there). We had paperwork, and the keys to the car. Steering wheel locks were not a problem. Most can be easily broken or defeated. I did not carry a pistol when I did it because I wasn't old enough.

The life of a repo man is not intense. Repo work is not glamorous. It's like delivery work in reverse. It also doesn't have to be any more dangerous than being a Jehova's witness (I undertand that Jehova's Witnesses are sometimes shot at too, but you know what I'm trying to say here).

We would simply go to the door, and tell the person that we were here for the car. Nobody was ever surprised, some were nasty (we were always polite). After explaining that they could end up before a judge if they would not let us take the car, even the nasty ones usually relented. If there was a threat of violence, we'd threaten to call the police. We had to do that only once.

There was only one time that I took a car without telling the borrower. We went to pick up a car and as we approached the house, the car pulled out of the driveway. We went down the street and turned around - figuring we'd come back another time. About a mile down the road we saw the car parked in a convenience store's lot, running, with no one in it. I jumped in and drove away. I got pulled over by the police shortly thereafter because the car had been reported stolen. They had a good description of me too. Good thing I had the paperwork.

I don't mean to imply that we were 100% successful. Often, people would "hide" the car. We were not investigators, we were reverse delivery men. If someone had the car tucked away safely in a garage in New Hampshire, we wouldn't stake them out and follow them. They didn't pay us enough. We'd tell our boss that the car was missing, he'd let the bank know, and I assume that they'd let the courts take over.

If someone is sneaking onto somebody else's property in the middle of the night, they should not be surprised if someone shoots at them. I'm not advocating it - I wouldn't shoot someone for taking my car (even though I own it outright). The "repo man" in the article was a nut. Plain and simple. You can say he was just doing his job, but think about it: Would the police or FBI do what he did? Sneak alone, at night, onto somebody's property? No way. They'd come in bunches, with body armor and dogs. The repo man wasn't making much money to do it so there had to be another reason.

I'm not saying it was the repo man's fault. Apparently, he had a legal right to go and get the car.

However, just because he was legally right doesn't mean he wasn't stupid.

 

[Jon Coppenbarger]

Dead beats ? Yeah I enjoyed making them walk. Was the bussiness back then on the up and up? Well most of it. I saw the seady side of it and the angles of it all the way from the dealerships to the bank to the guy losing the car on the repo.
Yeah there were the ones that got a car and lost it to a repo and then went out and bought another one before it showed on the credit rating. Remember that was before the computers were every where.
Lets take a more indepth look at what I obsereved in my years back then.
You had the bad guys. I have seen the ones mentioned above and then the ones who pretty much were dead beats. Then you had the criminals and gangster thugs. You had the skips and we made long dollars off of them.

Back then when a car might sell for under 10 grand and most were well under that back then you could control many things. We on our nightly ventures would troll the apartment complexes in some of the bad parts of town and other areas of oppertunity. Any vehicle that was from out of state that looked out of place. Like a expensive cadilac in a poor appartment complex or one with out of state plates that is expired. Bingo you just jotted the info down and ran a check and you might be amazed how many of those we got to pick up.
lets say we got one from missouri and we were in Ca at the time thats were I did my repo's. We would pick the car up and lets say this guy owed $2500 on a car that was worth $1500. Well 90% of the time they would not have the bucks to buy the car back. We would store the car in our lot untill the 30 days elasped and then would deal with the bank.
We charged $100 up front for the repo, Tow bill was always charged to a out of state repo and we made keys for them parked down the street with our own key machine a good part of the time or just towed them to a place we could hot wire it. We had our own tow hitch when we did not take the tow truck. so let us say we charged $65 for the tow, and more for things like keys and the such.
Now we always had travel expenses for those types of deals. So lets take on another $100 for that. Now we did not charge for the storage until the 30 days was up. but lets ad on like $100 for it by the time it either came up for sale or was to be sent back.
Now what about the condition of that $1500 dollar car? Yeah right those mags and nice tires are now I would not drive down the street and many other things, Hey the guy new it was getting repossed so he took things out like the stereo and other nice options. You sent the bill back to the back for the $365 with the photo's and the bill to ship it all the way back 2 thousand miles. Now the bank ends up looking at taking a car back that is hardly worth the trouble. So presto they auction it off in our great deal auction. Remember we get a cut and get another 10% on the auction on top of the $365 we already are getting right off the top. Guess who buys the car? Yeah you got it right the cousin, niece, uncle, friend at my regular job. Yeah we would subment the offers to the bank and 90% of the time they would buy off on it. So we just sold the car for $900. The bank is thinking wow we did pretty good and we got back $450 on a deal we thought we would lose everything on.
Then the car gets put back right and we sell it for say $1300 a few months later. We just made $855 on the whole deal of that one car. you do several of those a month on top of the 35 to 60 plus cars a month that got picked up and it does not take long to figure out who is getting fat back in the 1970's.

Oh trust me there were many things like that and many others. Yeah 8 out of 10 we did not charge them up if they were a good client. The local banks and dealers that we did lots of bussiness with got a square deal.

Furniture, It was like we would not do it unless we were forced into it. I can only remember like 5 or 6 times in all those years we did that. They were fairly easy back then as the local yokal went with you so the guy we were getting it from usually rolled right over. Yeah small towns were a hit or miss. You tried to get in and out fast. Mid sized towns of say 20K or so were the best as if you thought the guy was on the bad side of the law you had it made. They did not like him either and would stand by (they could not help) to give the impression that we had more power than we did. Sometimes they would have us go and eat and they would look for the car for us.

you guys want more stories? Like the bussiness we repossed all the vehicles. Got a gun put to my head on that one, plus got thrown off the hood of a car on that one also. Hey the guy ended up going to jail over robbing folks from his chain of waterbed stores. We even watched him walk out right in front of the cops in a dress and got away. That was funny.

Oh how about the one where I repossed my race engine builder's car while I was dating his daughter at the same time. I never told!

Man this brings back some times to this old guy.
Thanks

 

[UnintendedConsequences]

It is a toss up on the share of blame

Both of the people in the incident share blame. However, given the tactics of some reposession workers, it doesn't surprise me they have such high risk jobs. I have heard people talk about repo guys cutting locks off gates, breaking into locked garages and threatening to "mess up" the person if they resisted the repo. I've also heard stories of repo guys sneaking onto private property at night, but being killed because the property owner thought it was a criminal.

There are bad people in all areas, but there seems to be a higher number of less than honorable people in the field, just going from what I have heard.

In my part of the country I think the repo guys would need to wear head to toe body armor or borrow the county SWAT team for backup due to the ruralness of the area and the fact that so many people own firearms. I'm not advocating violence against repo people, but given that we have a high number of methheads committing crimes, repo guys who work late at night might easily be confused with the addicts. Additionally, due to the way the roads are named out here, it is easy to have your directions mixed up and you can mistakenly go to the wrong home.

I think the collection/repossession industry is one of a few where morality and ethics almost don't exist given the examples I have heard about. I am not refering to those who have posted on this topic, rather the examples I have heard about outside of this message board.

 

[Biker]

My bottom line is, all BS stops at my gate. If you have a legal right to do it, bring a cop. If not, hope you're not allergic to wood or lead.
Give me a call and we may talk. Sneak about at night, and things could go south quick, fast and in a hurry.
Biker

 

[ExtremeDooty]

I have a high level of contempt and little sympathy for those that choose to believe that they dont have to pay their bills and that they remain entitled to things that refuse to pay for. If you borrow money from someone and then refuse to pay it back then that makes you a deadbeat, and they have every right in the world to get it back

Things aren't always that black & white, but if it helps you sleep at night....

I think the collection/repossession industry is one of a few where morality and ethics almost don't exist given the examples I have heard about.

+1

 

[Reddog1]

Iknow a repo man here on Jackson lake who said
he did it for the rush he got. claims he been shot
at a few times. I have a bigger rush with my grandkids

jim

 

[Jon Coppenbarger]

Yes unintended I thnk you hit the nail on the head.
Sometimes when you are young it takes you a few years to understand the difference between what is legal so to speak and what is morally correct. It took me to see my father go threw bad times with my mother having cancer years before she dies of it to realize I could not live and treat people like that.

I gave it up around 28 years ago and still I have those thoughts of taking that guys car and truck that night. I know it is a job and somebody has to do it but not me.

Yeah I remember the gate fees. We used to be closed on weekends. Yeah right! Most folks had to work trying to make ends meet and the ones from a few miles away needed to pick up the cars they paid off or made up with the bank on the weekends. I would charge them what ever I thought I could get away with to open the gate so they could get their car back on the weekend.
A cheap car I would do it for $25 but a nice car it would be $40 or $50 for me to drive that 5 miles to open the gate. Good money back in 1973 for a lie.

Oh yeah you talk about locked gates. Well I never cut one but by law we could not enter a open garage as it was considered part of the house. Did open a few gates to get to the garage that was open.
One time we had looked for this little station wagon for like over a year. It was close to where I lived and I went by like every few days at different times and never could find it. Low and behold one sat. the thing is right in front of me and my partner so we followed it at a distance as we had the key for it from the dealer. the lady had a garage door opener and it opened and she drove in and parked. She was getting the packages out of the car and carrying them in threw the door into the house that was in the garage. She had left the door up.
She had been in the house just like 1 minute when I went into the garage and got into the station wagon. you need to remember that the first things you do before you start the car or attempt to start it is this. Turn off the radio, make sure the emergengy brake is off and have the car in the gear you wanted it. Well it was a little foreign job with a stick so I thought I had it in reverse. WRONG I launched the car into that lady's washer and dryer. she had time to hit the close door button on the wall of the garge and I slide out like a snake just before it closed and my partner picked me up. We denided it and she could not prove it was us. we still got it a few months later.

Everybody in the bussiness was running close to the same scams that I knew. There were only like 3 private firms and the francise one around so you got to know most of the guys who were doing it.
the guy who got shot well I was not there so I do not know what happened but I do know the rural ones can be scary. most have dogs and they give you away before you can get close so you end up trying to go and talk them into giving it up. Seldom worked but it was better than trying to get shot in the middle of the night on some farm in the middle of no place for a few bucks.

 

[c_yeager]

Things aren't always that black & white, but if it helps you sleep at night....

Yes of course, ones family and they themselves are always the exception to every convention that governs the rest of society. No thief ever goes to sleep at night thinking that they have done anything wrong. Their circumstance is unique and the whole world should recognise this.