Metro works to keep empty houses free of chop shops

By Abigail Goldman

Friday, July 10, 2009 | 2 a.m.

The home had been empty for six months when Mary Ann Young’s real estate agent called her with a question: Can you come get this car out of the garage?

Young told her agent she hadn’t left a car in the garage. Her agent insisted. So Young went to the Las Vegas home to see for herself, and, yes, there it was, a 2004 Chevy Tahoe — or at least the shell of a 2004 Chevy Tahoe.

The SUV was on blocks and gutted. The seats had been ripped out, the interior paneling and padding had been stripped, the head- and taillights — gone.

Young’s dilapidated 1967 house with an empty pool and garage had become what Metro detectives call a “chop rental.” That’s a vacant home, in this case a short-sale real estate listing, that’s used by criminals for the purpose of stripping stolen cars.

“If the house is empty and shut down, all you have to do is pirate a little electricity and off you go,” Metro Lt. Bob DuVall explains.

Why commit a crime on your own property, after all? And when the stripping is done, the thieves walk away from the carcass.

Whoever left the stolen SUV at Young’s also left behind a Dodgers hat.

DuVall won’t go into details, but he says it’s impossible for auto thieves to make a clean break from any chop shop — evidence is always left behind, or it walks in through the front door. Detectives working under DuVall at Metro’s auto theft section were staking out an empty chop rental house when a guy pulled up and strolled right in — like any employee showing up for work, the lieutenant says.

But criminals who get caught running chop rentals risk stacking up a number of charges on top of the ones directly related to stealing and stripping cars. In Nevada, entering a house or property to commit a crime is burglary, a felony.

Early last year, DuVall’s detectives were busting chop shops on a weekly basis, a number of which were run out of empty houses. Most of the people they’d arrest during these investigations worked within auto theft rings, so the word spread — police were on to the empty houses. In recent months, the number of chop rentals has dropped considerably.

“They’ve realized they probably have to go further underground,” DuVall says.

Maybe most realized that, but not all, because Young learned of the SUV in her garage June 30. It’s impossible to know how long people had been using Young’s house, or whether they were done. Whoever was stripping the car also left behind a back-seat DVD player. This could mean the thieves were scared off (perhaps when they realized a real estate agent had checked on the property), or not done working or just not in the market for any DVD players at the moment.

Because parts can be swapped among cars, thieves sometimes seek out very specific items, such as leather seats or doors with power windows. They know which models’ parts are interchangeable, and they take what they need.

As to whether that was what was going on with the SUV at Young’s house, DuVall’s detectives didn’t say. The house is still for sale, though it no longer comes with a stripped Chevy Tahoe.