The owner of a local limousine company is relieved after one of his stolen limos was returned about an hour after it went missing Friday night in downtown Red Deer.
“I’m just so happy it’s back,” said Keith Woodrow, owner of Our Place Limo.
“The guy that took it even filled it up with gas for me . . . Makes you almost not want to press charges.”
Woodrow stopped at the downtown Dairy Queen on Gaetz Avenue with his daughter for ice cream around 6 p.m. They were in his 1999 Lincoln town car, a 30-foot white stretch limo.
He left the keys in the car and the windows rolled down because it was hot, he said.
When they came back out, barely 10 minutes later, the limo was gone.
“It was definitely my own fault that it got stolen,” said Woodrow, who has never had a vehicle stolen before.
He has been running Our Place Limo on evenings and weekends for the past three years.
He notified the RCMP immediately.
“I was panicking a bit that’s for sure.”
He also noted that the car probably only had about 60 kilometers of fuel left at the time it was stolen.
An hour later Woodrow received a call from police that an Alberta Gold taxi had spotted the limo parked back in Dairy Queen parking lot.
It was parked in the exact same parking stall Woodrow had left it in.
“We all figure it was just a joy ride, someone wanting to test it out . . . No damage was done, though there was one scuff mark on the back tire,” he said.
Woodrow said police later picked up a male suspect.
rfrancoeur@www.reddeeradvocate.com