MANSFIELD - How long would it take a thief to cut the catalytic converter off your car while you're shopping in a store or watching a movie?
It doesn't take much more than a minute. And police and victims say it seems to be happening more recently.
"This is the converter right here," said repair shop owner Sam Khader, crouching beneath a car raised on a rack. "What they do is cut it off from here [pointed behind the part]. They cut it off from here [pointing in front]."
Two quick cuts at the front and back of the converter, and the thief is gone. You come out, and your car sounds like a World War II bomber.
And if you have a lot of cars, like Khader's repair shop on Mansfield Highway, you can lose a lot of converters in a hurry.
Thieves want the platinum inside.
"So far, we've counted 13," Khader said.
Those are just recent thefts. He lost five in one night this month. Another Fort Worth body shop lost five this weekend.
It took Khader 30 seconds to cut through an exhaust pipe with a reciprocating saw. From the demonstration, he figures it takes a thief a minute or less to steal a converter.
It makes Khader catalytic apoplectic.
"It gets to you after a while," he said. "You lose 10 converters. That's $5,000."
He's got nothing on the used car dealer a few blocks down on Mansfield Highway.
"They jump the fence and they steal in one day, almost 20 converters from the cars," said Radi Khader, the car dealer and Sam's father.
"I put up cameras," Radi Khader said. "They stole the cameras the second day."
They'll have a tougher time stealing Radi Khader's taller, pointier fence. He installed it a few weeks ago to protect his cars.
"[It] cost me $30,000," he said.
He estimates that's roughly the cost of the 70 or so catalytic converters thieves stole from him in the past year.
E-mail jdouglas@wfaa.com
