What’s loud, slow and weighs 50,000 pounds? It’s definitely not a certain Chicken-Fried News staffer trying to get back to work after a drunken New Year’s Eve. The answer would be a parked front loader that was stolen from a construction site in Oklahoma City in early December.
The owner of the stolen CAT 950G reported it missing to Oklahoma City Police Department, which concluded that a thief must have driven it off a worksite in the middle of the night … because that’s obviously the most discreet thing to do.
Nonetheless, the tactic worked and the perp might have gotten away with it if the vehicle’s owner didn’t tack missing CAT 950G posters around town.
One man saw the posters and anonymously left the owner an address over the phone. We can only imagine that this Good Samaritan got teary-eyed by the memory of his own front loader that also went missing one cold winter night. That, or he was the actual perpetrator with stealer’s remorse, and that front loader was like The Tell-Tale Heart with really pungent exhaust.
Either way, the owner tracked his front loader down, found it in an empty field, drove it back to OKC and hopefully made sure to lock it up before he closed it down for the day.
Thus reads the happy ending of a made-in-Oklahoma children’s bedtime story. The moral of the story? Keep your filthy hands off my front loader, son.
