Every 19 seconds a car is stolen. Every day about 70 automobiles are carjacked. But it is not statistics that make people tuck the Mace into the glove compartment, or change their route home from work, or discover the virtues of carpooling, or prefer the risk of a ticket to stopping at red lights in a bad part of town. It is the stories, not the statistics, that breed fear.
Every place has at least one crime that makes it shudder. Maryland had the Pamela Basu case, in which the young woman in a gold BMW was dragged to her death trying to save her baby daughter when thieves drove off in her car. Los Angeles mourned Sherri Foreman, 29, a pregnant beautician who was stabbed by a carjacker when she stopped her 1984 BMW at an automated-teller machine. By the time the ambulance reached the hospital, the 12-week-old fetus was dead. A day later, so was the mother.
Detroit pretty much invented carjacking, so its police force has had the most practice in fighting it. They've spent the past three months trying to find the killer of Mark Rayner, a 255-lb. National Golden Gloves heavyweight champ, who was carjacked for his new white Jeep Grand Cherokee when he stopped at a phone booth on his way home from a movie. When he tried to escape by driving off, the thugs opened fire. At least five bullets hit the side of his Jeep; two hit Rayner in the back, killing him instantly.
On July 17 in Pine Hills, Florida, Philip Chandler, 16, emerged from a local barbershop and was about to drive off in his parents' 1986 Ford Mustang when he was accosted by two teenagers, forced into the car's trunk and taken along for a long joyride. Five hours later, Chandler was found in a parking lot 30 miles away, suffering from dehydration and comatose from the 130 degrees heat in the trunk. After two weeks he regained some consciousness, but doctors fear he may have suffered irreversible brain damage. "He wasn't in the wrong place at the wrong time," said Orange County Sheriff's Sergeant Mike Easton. "He was doing what any one of us would be doing on a Saturday morning -- taking care of errands."
Carjacking is not a new crime, nor is it yet a routine one. But the fear of it is growing exponentially and in the process changing the way America drives. The FBI estimates that there were 25,000 carjackings last year, up an alarming 25% from the year before. That is still only a tiny fraction of the 1.6 million annual car thefts, but when combined with other incidents in which cars have become both weapons and targets -- the drive-by shootings in Washington or the cinder blocks dropped off highway overpasses in Detroit -- it leaves an impression of rolling danger that fuels a kind of hysteria. "Our agents say there's real fear on the streets," says Howard Apple, head of the FBI's interstate theft unit. "Some crimes you can avoid by avoiding high-crime areas, but people are getting carjacked in their own driveways. People are scared enough that they are not driving alone."