Couldn’t find an appropriate thread to latch onto for this.
My wife is a nurse, and parks in a parking garage at work. Three times in the past three weeks, someone has put nails or screws in her tires. We thought the first two flats were coincidence, but the third (with the screw still hanging out of it) pretty much seals the deal that someone is targeting her car.
Security at the hospital is shrugging their shoulders over it. Apparently it’s not an uncommon occurrence, but it’s also pretty rare to have the same car vandalized multiple times. Someone has something against Mazda 3’s, I guess?
And, no, my wife doesn’t have any enemies ;)
So any suggestions of car security hardware that would help here? Like do I put a backwards-facing camera in? Or a car alarm with proximity sensor to hopefully dissuade someone? I hate those damn things, but we can’t keep this up. We’re on our third tire replacement. It’s ridiculous.
Are you a two car family? Could you switch cars for a bit? Otherwise, maybe drop her off and pick her up?
Many dashcams have parking monitors. You’ll probably want two, front and back, and make sure they take high-quality video to help identify the vandal. Just having the cameras visibly mounted may act as a deterrent.
Yeah, she’s been driving my truck while we’ve been getting tires repaired, but it’s a 40 mile commute and the truck is hell on gas. So not really a long-term solution.
Thanks! A quick look at Amazon and WireCutter shows me bunches of options. So I’ll dig in. Seems like parking mode might require some hardwiring, which is beyond my capabilities, but a bit of an investment with an installer is better than buying tires every week.
BiggerBoat –
I’d like to dismiss this as a prank but unless there are multiple cars getting targeted at the same time - which doesn’t seem to be the case - this is serious.
I’m going to presume you’re correct that she doesn’t have any enemies. I’d be much more concerned that a patient with a mental illness has followed your wife, identified her car, for whatever reason. This person is demonstrating some capacity for violence. Three times in three weeks is outrageous behavior.
I’m a physician and work at a large clinic in a decent size city. The overwhelming majority of our workforce is women. A lot of hospitals and clinics do not take these safety issues seriously until something tragic happens, although some are getting a little better. Hospital security is almost always inept at anything other than handling intoxicated patients or family members.
If this were my wife, I’d call the police. She has a stalker until proven otherwise and given the location of the crime there is a significant chance this person has real mental health issues. This could be a patient that only saw her in passing and whom she has never met or only had a brief interaction with (like an elevator). She should never park in that parking garage with any car until this is resolved. Ideally, she shouldn’t be going anywhere on that hospital campus alone.
I very much want to be wrong about this but your post is chillingly similar to a problem we had in our hospital 8-9 years ago.
Thanks. I appreciate this. We are probably being a bit too flippant about it. We’ll apply some due diligence.
@Hiredgoons is correct, I’d absolutely call the cops in this situation.
I agree with Hiredgoon. There’s a pattern here so premeditation. I mean, jesus, that’s a lot of manic energy to devote to targetting someone. I’m way too lazy to do anything like that.
Maybe the hospital has a more secure area she could park in for a bit? Could they reserve a spot for her that has a security camera trained on it? They really need to catch whomever is doing this so they can figure just what level of threat he is.
Does the hospital not have security cameras in the garage? They obviously can’t just hand over the tapes, but if you make enough noise you can get them to let you see them, or take a look on their own and see if it’s someone they recognize.
