ST. LOUIS – A couple of St. Louis car wash owners, fed up with being targets of crime, are fighting back. Their efforts are working, and they have the video to prove it.
Don Barrett was washing his car at the Classic Car Wash on Reavis Barracks. He said he was glad to see new ownership restoring the business with new paint, new pavement, and new equipment, but he was sorry to hear about the same old issues.
“The guy’s working really hard to get his business going, and somebody wants to ruin it for you,” Barrett said.
Just after 9:15 p.m. Saturday, surveillance video showed a man in a black shirt hiding a prybar behind his back as another man in red pretends to be vacuuming a car. The two men were seen trying to pry open the vacuum’s coin boxes. The video also showed them taking off after being surprised by a siren and strobe lights.
The car wash owner had been watching the suspects from his home through a new 32-camera security system. The owner activated the system’s strobe lights and sirens.
Ken Marsh has the same security system at the Neighborhood Car Wash on Kingshighway in St. Louis. He also expressed the same issues: thieves expecting to find a small fortune in quarters in various car wash coin boxes.
Marsh’s cousin, Brian Joachimstaler, owns the Classic Car Wash. The two of them own a total of four car washes in St. Louis, St. Louis County, and Fairview Heights, Illinois.
The change machine at their car washes spits out car wash tokens, not money.
“They think there’s a lot of money in here,” Marsh said of the thieves. “They’re wasting their time. What they did (at Classic Car Wash) is not worth what they’re about to get as soon as police find them. It won’t pay for their soda in jail.”
He said it did leave behind a couple of thousand dollars with damage.
The issues have to do with more than the continual stream of thieves trying to break into coin boxes for a few dollars in loose change. People are using area car washes as dumping grounds, leaving behind old tires and lots of trash.
Marsh has an answer for that, too.
“I don’t put up with vandalism. I don’t put up with litter. I don’t put up with any of that,” he said. “You don’t want to come into a trashed car wash. You litter at my place, and it actually gets delivered back to your house. I’ve done it.”
He’s got a video of that, too.
Joachimstaler filed a report with St. Louis County Police Department on Saturday night’s crime. He said the video should make it very easy to find the suspects.