Thieves wore path in grass to Co-op
Published 12:00 am Sunday, July 28, 2002
“This neighborhood is a nightmare.”
Tim Wood is general manager of Central Alabama Farmers Co-Op at the corner of Marie Foster Street and Jeff Davis Avenue.
When he describes the challenges of doing business at that location for the last 18 years, he doesn’t speak of competition in the marketplace, or the difficulty of hiring good employees, or boosting the ad budget.
He talks of the Christmas season when his warehouse was broken into eight times during a 14-day period. He talks of thieves who struck so often they wore a path in the grass leading up to his building. He talks of other thieves so brazen that they simply walked up to lawnmowers displayed at the front of the store and began pushing them down the road.
“I remember one time we were pulling inventory inside the warehouse, and while we were on the inside there were these people in our yard stealing stuff on the outside,” Wood recalls, shaking his head. “We had to put in razor wire because people have been climbing the fence and stealing big, big items.”
He talks of hearing gunshots at all hours of the day and night and of at least one person being shot and killed just across the street from his place of business.
“One morning about 5 o’clock we were in the yard getting ready for work when we heard the dangdest noise,” Wood says.
The noise turned out to be a truck loaded with people that was being pursued at high speed by another group of people in a Ford Mustang. There were guns in evidence in both vehicles.
“The truck came sliding into our parking lot so fast we had to jump out of the way,” Wood says. “Then just about the time we get up and dust ourselves off, here they come again from the other direction – same truck, same car. We figured it must have been a drug deal gone bad.”
The co-op has already broken ground for a new facility on U.S. Hwy 80 on the outskirts of the city. And while Wood emphasizes that the repeated incidents of crime his business has endured at its present location is not the prime reason for the move, he admits “it was a factor.”
“I would say the crime in this neighborhood was a factor – not the neighborhood, but the crime. Because we’ve made a lot of good friends here over the years,” he says. “But, yes, we’ve seen our fair share of crime since we’ve been here.”
So much crime, in fact, that at one point a couple of years ago the police department placed two off-duty officers inside the co-op warehouse at night for an entire week in an attempt to deter break-ins. A video camera was also installed to record what took place.
Wood still has one of those videos. He keeps it, he says, because it makes him laugh – in the same way that you have to laugh sometimes to keep from crying.
The video shows a thief rifling the drawer of the cash register. “We leave the drawer open at night,” Wood explains, “so they don’t tear the register up getting to it.” Next, the video shows the two officers moving in to make the arrest.
The thief goes down on one knee, hands in the air, wailing as though he has suddenly seen the light, “Don’t shoot me! Please! Mister Policeman! Don’t shoot me!”
“Next thing you know,” Wood chuckles, “he’s up and out of there like greased lightning. They never did catch him.”