*Featured image contains photo by Kindel Media
A thief in Portland, Oregon tried to steal a 1999 white Cadillac… Unfortunately for him, he picked the wrong car.
When 79-year-old great-grandmother, Noble Jean Napoleon caught the thief in the act, she wasn’t having it.
Undaunted, not only did she thwart her own vehicle’s theft but her actions helped authorities bust a car theft ring. And if there’s any lesson to be learned from this, it’s “Don’t mess with Grandma.”
Great-Grandma Stops a Car Thief
When Napoleon picked up her great-grandkids from school the last thing she expected to see was her Cadillac drive-by on the back of a tow truck.
Having left the car parked outside her apartment earlier that afternoon while she borrowed her son’s SUV, she was just pulling out of a gas station when the tow truck rumbled past.
Knowing something was drastically wrong, she immediately sprang into action. Telling her great-grandkids to “fasten their seatbelts tight,” Granny took off in hot pursuit.
“I was trailing him,” she told the Oregonian. “I was right on his butt.”
The tow truck driver and alleged car thief, Joseph Allen Beard, 52, had no idea what was coming. (Hell hath no fury like a great-grandma whose Caddy is being stolen).
Napoleon pulled up beside the truck, rolled down her window, and yelled, “You take my damn car back where you got it from!”
Instead of stopping, Beard sped off. Undaunted, Napoleon charged.
“Let’s GO!”
Noble Jean Napoleon
At one point in her chase, she enlisted the help of a few men parked on the side of the road, asking them to follow her.
Eventually, she caught up to the thief and her self-appointed deputies helped box him in. When the men got out of their cars and approached the truck driver, she yelled at them not to “beat him up.”
“I need him to take my car back home,” she told them.
Operation MistleTOW
When Napoleon confronted Beard, he tried to convince her that the Cadillac was his friend’s car.
When that didn’t work, he offered to unhitch the vehicle and leave it. But Napoleon wasn’t done with him yet.
“You’re taking it back where it came from,” she told him. She then proceeded to follow him all the way home.
“I trailed him all the way back,” she said. “I wasn’t playin’.”
Napoleon contacted the police shortly afterward, giving them Beard’s license plate number. It was exactly what they needed to finally bust “Operation MistleTow” wide open.
Apparently, this wasn’t an isolated event. For the past few months, the District Attorney’s Office’s Auto Theft Task Force had been waiting for the break they needed to stop an illegal tow truck operation stealing cars and selling them for scrap metal.
That’s where our unlikely vigilante comes in.
According to the DA’s Office, a representative of Maters Auto Recycling sold about 80 vehicles to Rivergate Scrap Metal, at least 22 of which were stolen. The representative is alleged to be Beard.
Thanks to Napoleon, Beard was arrested and the operation shut down.
Now, he’s facing multiple charges, including Trafficking in Stolen Vehicles, Unauthorized Use of a Vehicle, Possession of a Stolen Vehicle, Theft, Criminal Mischief, Forgery, and Identity Theft. He’s pleaded “Not Guilty.”
Don’t Mess With Grandma
While the police cautioned Napoleon not to take matters into her own hands in the future and to “be careful,” the sassy septuagenarian says Beard is the one who should have been careful.
“If I had my slugger in here, he’d have been careful ’cause I would have slugged him all over everything, yes,” she said.
Despite her age (or maybe because of it), Napoleon is clearly a force to be reckoned with. And she proves that when it comes to courage and fighting injustice, we all have the power to stand up. No matter our age or circumstances.
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