To get one’s vehicle back after a theft can be seen as a stroke of excellent luck.
A good number of stolen vehicles, after all, are either wrecked by joyriders or chopped up for illegal parts sales.
The Culver family of Pierce County, Washington — home of Tacoma — had no such problems when their 2002 Ford F-350 was returned to them by law enforcement without major damage.
Then they started to experience odd symptoms.
According to a report Sunday by KCPQ-TV in Seattle, family patriarch Jake Culver said his 8- and 10-year-old children began experiencing “sleep disruptions and upset stomachs, while he felt headaches after the few drives they took together.”
That’s when a neighbor questioned the Culvers about whether they’d checked for invisible damage to the truck.
“She asked us, ‘Had we had it tested for drugs?’” Jake Culver said.
“And we said, ‘No, why would we?’”
Well, it turns out that there’s a good chance a stolen vehicle is used by people breaking other laws as well — particularly in regard to illicit substances.
Have you ever had a vehicle stolen?
Yes: 33% (1 Votes)
No: 67% (2 Votes)
“Using the same company their insurance hires to test for biohazards, Jake believed the report would come back negative,” KCPQ reported.
“Instead, it showed traces of methamphetamine exceeded national safe exposure limits by eight times, while fentanyl returned two times higher than acceptable,” the outlet said.
It’s rather amazing that there are “national safe exposure levels” to meth and fentanyl, but there you have it: the potential cause of the headaches, sleep disturbances and upset tummies.
“My wife just broke down in tears when I told her the results of the test,” Culver told the station.
“My heart sank,” he said. “If she had inhaled the fentanyl or something like that, I mean, who knows where we’d be right now.”
Culver now blames the insurance company for failing to test for illicit substance exposure inside the pickup truck, noting that the firm — not named in the report — often conducts such evaluations.
“I expect the people paid to help us through these troubles would actually do their job, and that’s more shocking, frankly, than the drug use and the car theft,” he said.
“We can’t undo the exposure my family experienced, but we can hopefully educate other people who do get their cars back or are about to get their cars back that they need to have these things tested every single time. Without question,” Culver said.
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The good news is that the family was riding in the tainted vehicle for only a week before the test results revealed the toxicity from multiple drugs.
On another level, however, the family’s ordeal is emblematic of the opioid crisis in America — and the liberals who have enabled it.
Consider that in nearby Seattle, the City Council voted against a law that would allow law enforcement to prosecute public drug use cases, according to a June report from KING-TV.
“We cannot further criminalize the crisis, the mental health and behavioral health and substance abuse crisis of addiction,” Councilmember Teresa Mosqueda said. “That is a public health issue and deserves to be treated as a public health crisis.”
This is despite the fact that, according to a poll by The Seattle Times, most residents support public drug use arrests.
This isn’t to say that such legislation would have made a difference for a family whose truck was stolen in nearby Pierce County. However, it’s illustrative of whom the left wants to protect. These “victimless crimes” seem to rope in a whole lot of other victims, including the Culver family.
Will this case teach any progressive a lesson? Of course not — and that’ll ensure there are going to be plenty more families facing the same predicament that the Culvers did.
Nice work, leftists.
