U-Haul stolen from family passing through Macon found ditched — minus its belongings
A tipped-over piano and some scattered toys were about all that remain of a young Florida family’s possessions after the U-Haul they rented was stolen last week when they stopped overnight at a Macon hotel.
The theft, which happened the night of Dec. 13 at the Macon Marriott City Center on Coliseum Drive, left the family with few other belongings. They had packed the truck with most of their stuff for a move from central Florida to Huntsville, Alabama.
Kathleen Carney, along with her husband, her twin 2-year-old daughters and her 3-year-old daughter, stopped for the night in Macon, parked the 26-foot U-Haul and checked into their room.
The family didn’t discover the theft until morning. Fortunately, they were not stranded. Carney had been driving the family’s Ford F-150, following her husband in the U-Haul.
After reporting the theft, they traveled on in the pickup to their destination in northern Alabama.
“We moved into an empty house,” Carney told The Telegraph by phone on Tuesday. “We’re starting from zero.”
The family’s U-Haul turned up Monday near Interstate 20 near Decatur, just east of Atlanta, authorities said. It had been emptied of its contents somewhere else and ditched along a highway.
Five such thefts of rental moving trucks from Macon hotels in the past year or so have all had ties to the Atlanta area, where the trucks have been found abandoned, police said.
Carney said she and her family were traveling north up I-75 from Orlando and had stopped in Macon “specifically to avoid Atlanta.”
Bibb County sheriff’s Lt. Sean DeFoe said Tuesday that video surveillance of the Marriott parking lot showed three men enter the lot at about 11:30 p.m. on Dec. 13, raise the hood of the U-Haul and apparently hot-wire it before driving away.
“What they do is take these vehicles to a different location and empty out the trucks looking for items of value,” DeFoe said.
The Atlanta-area thieves likely cruise the freeways scoping out hotel lots for rental vans.
One factor that may play into the hands of the culprits is that hotels often ask the drivers of larger vehicles to park them on the outskirts of their properties, sometimes isolating the trucks in low-lit areas.
“It’s all over the country,” DeFoe said of the thefts. “It’s not just Macon.”
So far investigators haven’t had much luck catching the bandits, though Carney said that in the wake of her belongings being stolen someone in Atlanta tried to forge a check of hers. The checkbook had been packed in a box in the U-Haul and when a check-cashing company called her to verify the check, a woman trying to cash it was spooked and left empty-handed.
“We went to Huntsville and the next day we were closing on our new home,” she said, but with no belongings to move into it.
“That was really horrible and depressing” Carney said. “So the last few days we’ve just been running around trying to get appliances. We had to buy mattresses just to sleep on the floor.”
The family has a GoFundMe page for donations.
This story was originally published December 21, 2021 at 12:42 PM.