Kids Age 11, 12, And 14 Caught Trying to Steal Hellcats From Dodge Factory
Image: Dodge
Younger Gen Z and Gen Alpha kids have a lot of love for the Dodge Charger and Challenger. My own 11-year-old son loves them. Just the other day, he sent me a screenshot of a build he did on a Charger SRT Jailbreak. Some kids, though, seem to take that love too far. Fox 2 Detroit reports that three kids, all under 16 years old, attempted to steal multiple brand-new Hellcats straight from the Dodge factory.
Detroit police caught the kids, aged 11, 12, and 14, in a storage lot at Dodge’s Jefferson North Plant. The kids had been attempting to break into Charger and Challenger Hellcats that were stored in the lot. The cars they were trying to take were worth between $80,000 and $90,000.
Police are still trying to figure out whether the kids were doing it on their own, or working on behalf of someone else. “To me in my mind, I would think somebody a little older got these kids out here and are putting in orders,” Lt. Clive Stewart, head of Detroit’s commercial auto theft unit, told Fox 2. “The older offenders know, ‘I can do this and not really have my hands on it because I didn’t really steal the car.’”
What’s sad is this doesn’t seem to be terribly surprising for local authorities.
The Detroit metro area has seen a rise in carjackings. Police say area thefts are up 40 percent. And a lot of times, kids are the ones doing the stealing. Authorities told Fox 2 that another 14-year-old was arrested over the weekend for attempted car theft. That kid was a repeat offender: Cops had encountered him months before and arrested him for the same thing. One has to wonder if there’s an underground black market of stolen SRT products in Detroit with kids doing the dirty work.
