TULSA -- It’s a business transaction gone wrong.
A woman living in the Terrace Drive area was punched in the face by a man she thought was interested in buying her car.
Hailey Crouch wrote ‘For Sale’ on the back of her Mitsubishi 3000GT that was parked outside of her home.
Thursday morning, a man she did not know knocked on the door of her house.
“He said he was just walking by and just happened to notice that I had for sale written on the car,” Crouch said.
She said the conversation was very friendly and polite. Crouch said he called her “ma’am” and gave her a firm handshake. The man who called himself “Leonard” spent about 30 minutes looking at the car with her and her boyfriend.
“When he realized the 3000 GT wouldn’t start, I told him I would pull my parents Suburban around and hook the jumper cables up to it so he could see how it did and acted when it was trying to start,” Crouch explained.
That is when things went south. The man said he wanted to come back another day to look at the car again. Crouch said he unhooked the jumper cables from her parents’ Suburban and closed the hood.
“He literally says ‘Oh, I’m taking your truck,’ and that obviously caught me off guard,” Crouch said. “I went and tried to stop him and he hit me and punched me in the face. I fell down.”
The next thing she knew, the suspect got in the Suburban, which is not the car she had for sale, and took off. That was the last she saw of the man she thought was genuinely interested in buying her car.
She described it as an out of body experience.
“It could have been much worse,” Crouch said. “He could have had a weapon. We could have had a weapon on us and he would have been willing to die over a car in a situation like that. It’s crazy to think people are willing to do such extreme crazy things over cars or things in your house.”
Looking back Crouch said she would do things differently.
“If I had to do it over again, definitely would not write ‘for sale’ on my car,” Crouch said. “Definitely put it at a shop or something. Not put it in front of the house.”
Crouch has taken the writing off of her car.
Tulsa Police said they are looking for the suspect. He is described as a white male about 6 feet tall in his mid-20s with light brown buzzed hair. They said he has a sleeve of tattoos on one arm and tribal tattoos on the other. The car he got away in is a tan 2001 Chevy Suburban.
TPD urges people who are selling possessions to strangers to meet in well-populated places, such as a gas station or the police department’s parking lot.
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