ALAN ZURAKOWSKI AS TOLD TO
THE MAINSTREETER

It was 2:00 o’clock in the morning, and my neighbour across the street, Mike, calls us at home. My wife, Joanne, answers and wakes me up, saying, “there’s a tow truck going to tow your truck away.”

I’m only half awake. But I run downstairs with my phone. I have the winter parking rules in my head. I run outside and, sure enough, there’s a white tow truck that’s backed up to my truck and the front tires of my truck are off the ground. There’s a guy by the car putting straps over my tires.

I say to him: ‘Hey, if it’s winter parking, I’ll move it no problem at all. Just save you the hassle of towing it away.’ That’s what’s in my mind. And he says to me: ‘Okay, let me just call my boss and check.’ So, he calls someone on his cell phone and says to me: ‘Okay, yeah, I’ll drop it.’

He then lowers my truck and takes the strap off and starts putting all his stuff away in the tow truck. Meanwhile, I’m starting to wake up at this point, and I notice that there are vehicles parked all around mine. I’m thinking that I’m gonna have to start calling up all the neighbours because I don’t want anyone else getting towed for winter parking rules. That’s what I’m thinking, because it’s all happening quickly.

Anyway, the guy pulls away in his tow truck, and I’m thinking he’s going to go across the street, and tow other cars. But instead, he just pulls away slowly, like 25 kilometres an hour, and kind of dawdles his way down Mason Terrace.

(Editor’s Note: What happens next is the stuff of Hollywood, right here in Old Ottawa East. Back to Zurakowski, who tells it best):
I’m starting to clear my head of sleep a little more, and I begin to think this is weird. So, I decide next to get into my car and I basically started to follow him. I’m curious what’s going on.

The tow truck turns right at the end of my block and pulls into the little cul de sac at the end of Mutchmor. And I think: ‘Oh, okay’, because sometimes tow trucks park there, and I decide to circle the block. Remember, it’s 2:15 in the morning.

I circle back and I see that he’s moving again – now he’s on McGillivray Street and he pulls in front of another parked car there. I’m thinking he’s going to talk to someone on the phone again, so I pass the truck and circle the block again.

By this point, I’m wide awake and I realize that there’s no markings on this white tow truck, whatsoever. Like, there’s no Al’s Tow Truck or anything written on the side. And there’s no license plates either.

So I circle back to McGillivray, and he’s not there. I drive up to Clegg Street, and there he is turning onto Colonel By Drive. He heads north on Colonel By at about 35 kilometres an hour, not speeding away or anything like that. I’m thinking that he didn’t tow any cars away in my neighbourhood. Clearly, I got the winter parking thing wrong.

At that point, as we’re both heading north on Colonel By, I decide to call 9-1-1. I tell them that I’m following a white tow truck that just tried to hook up to my vehicle, and that the guy left, and that there’s no markings on this tow truck. They asked me where we were and I told them that we were just turning left over Pretoria Bridge and starting to travel up Elgin Street.

Now, it’s 2:30 am, there’s nobody in sight, and the tow truck turns left on Gladstone Avenue. The guy’s a couple of blocks ahead of me, but he’s dawdling. He’s going really slow, which kind of threw me off, because I’m thinking, if you’re stealing something you’re likely to be zipping out of there. But he didn’t do that.

Now we’re both on Gladstone, and I have the police on 9-1-1 on the line. Then, I get a red light. It was almost funny – the 9-1-1 guy, it was like he was in the car with me. He says: ‘By the way, don’t do any traffic violations following this guy, just keep your distance.’ So, in the middle of this low speed chase, there I am stopped at a red light. He’s two or three blocks ahead of me heading west towards Bank Street.

He then turns south down Bank Street, heading into the Glebe, on the other side of the Queensway. Now, he’s four or five blocks ahead of me and he turns left on Strathcona Avenue and he’s heading east now towards Queen Elizabeth Drive. Just as I turn onto Bank Street, no cars anywhere in sight, two police cars pull up right beside me on the right side. I lower my window and tell them: ‘I’m the guy following the tow truck.’

The 9-1-1 guy is talking to me in the car. He tells me to drive up to Strathcona and when I get there, pull over and wait for the police who are going to want to talk to me. I do that and there are four police cars there that came the other way. Boom. The tow truck’s stopped further down Strathcona and I’m right at the corner of Strathcona and Bank.

Down at the end of Strathcona, the police are arresting the driver and impounding that tow truck. The police are very nice to me. They were very appreciative. They tell me: ‘We’ve known about this white tow truck for a while. And thank you very much for following him and calling us up.’

The detective says they’ve arrested the guy, they have the tow truck, and they have a cell phone that has phone numbers that he was calling. All very helpful to their investigation. And my job is done.

MIKE POWER AS TOLD TO
THE MAINSTREETER

I got up at three o’clock in the morning for a drink of water. I’m back in bed, and it’s exactly 20 after three. I’m trying to get back to sleep, and I hear six beeps on a car alarm. I wasn’t sure whose car it was because there are a few cars around here that I think would be fair game to be stolen. Anyway, I ran down the stairs and by the time I got to my front porch, which was a couple of minutes, there was nothing on the street. I didn’t even see any taillights. They took my truck in a flash.

It was a brand spanking new black Toyota Tundra Sport. I had it for 15 days and it got stolen from right in front of my house. The beeps I heard was the alarm on my truck. They have an alarm system on them that comes from the factory. I am assuming that they were already in the truck when I got down the stairs. It happened so quickly and they were gone. The street was clean, there was no broken glass. There’s a streetlight on every pole. Everything was number one. There was absolutely no sign of any disturbance at all.

Pictured here is a 2024 Toyota Tundra truck of the kind that was stolen under cover of darkness from in front of Mike Power’s house on Springhurst Avenue. According to Ottawa Police, “Toyota Tundras and Land Rovers are being targeted at significant rates over the past year, which appears to be a developing trend.” Photo Supplied

So I called the police and they showed up very quickly. An officer came into the house and I gave him a long written statement that I wrote out. He told me that there’s young guys dealing these cars – 15, 16 and 17 – and they’re getting anywhere from $300 to $800 per car. They steal them and then they park them not too far away, usually somewhere in the city and leave them for a cool down period. Then they take them probably by trailer out to Montreal.

I really had no idea how rampant this auto theft is. It’s just gotten out of hand. And you know, many people you talk to in this community still believe that Old Ottawa East is a safe haven. They think auto theft is going on somewhere else, but they don’t understand how much crime – and not just auto theft – is taking place in this community. So I think it’s helpful in a way to let people know about crime right here. I wish it wasn’t the case, but it is.

So now, I’ve got a welder making a gate that I can padlock on the front corner ofmy house. I have a garage, but it’s full of everything so I’m cleaning that out. I put a motion sensor right on the corner of my house now that activates when people walk on the sidewalk. There’s a wheel disc that you can buy online. It’s like a whole slipcover that goes over the steering wheel with a bar. It’s supposed to be a pretty good thing. There’s no end to what you can do, and what you can spend.