Just a couple of short months after buying the truck of his dreams, a Ram 1500 TRX, a man from Broward County, Florida, was filing a report with the local sheriff’s office to track it down—and hopefully, recover it. The high-powered pickup was stolen. Unfortunately, the owner never heard back from authorities on the investigation, so he decided to take matters into his own hands.
The TRX owner, named Jonathan in a report from WSVN-TV in Miami, started his search on Craigslist and initially turned up no leads. Weeks later, he got a notification on his phone—presumably through Stellantis’ vehicle-connected app—that the truck had been driven 800 miles since he last saw it. While the thief ostensibly disabled the vehicle’s GPS, the odometer updates fortunately never stopped.
That was a lucky break for Jonathan, and it gave him some insight into where his truck could be. “I just started checking Facebook Marketplace and all those areas that, you know, were in that radius,” the owner told the news channel.
Eventually, he found a similar-looking TRX in a Facebook Marketplace listing located, sure enough, roughly 800 miles away in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, outside Nashville. The seller was asking $80,000. Jonathan didn’t have an address, but he did notice that the same house appeared behind multiple vehicles promoted for sale. Cue a nine-hour search on Google Maps down every road in that vicinity.
When Jonathan found what he believed was the right residence, he let police in Tennessee know and flew to Nashville. Deputies found his truck hours later, and Jonathan could presumably breathe a long sigh of relief as he drove his lost Ram home. Since then, he’s been sleuthing for others’ stolen vehicles and is seemingly getting results. “I already found another car that belonged to a friend of mine, and that car was in Texas,” Jonathan said. “So he got his car back, and now we’re looking for another.”
Jonathan’s story is a reminder not to lose hope in a stressful situation like theft, even if you’re not receiving proper help when and where you expect it. And if you live in or near Florida and happen to be struggling with a search of your own, there’s a guy out there who might just be able to help you.
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