Ten years ago my friends and I did something stupid and crazy and almost went to jail over it.
That close call is what forced me to change my life.
We had stolen a few things in order to sell them and pocket a little money. When I realized how close I came to ending up in jail, I made a change in my behavior. Because enough time has passed I can finally talk about it in public. I have long wanted to confess, but needed to wait until the statute of limitations had expired, so that I couldn’t be charged with a crime for stealing those air conditioners. The more we stole things, the more audacious our crimes became, culminating in stealing a moving van filled with HVAC equipment. At the time we didn’t know how much all these heaters and air conditioners were worth, we just knew the truck was full to capacity. We hotwired the truck and drove it to a junkyard outside of town where we could spend some time going through the HVAC equipment we stole and take an inventory. Using a laptop computer we did research on what we had, and what the resale value was, and found that we had well over twenty thousand dollars worth of HVAC equipment. It was out biggest score ever, and we were all high-fiving each other when the police showed up. It turns out the HVAC contractor got us on camera stealing his truck, and called the police immediately. We all scrambled and ran away, and luckily none of us got caught.