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Kurth on one of her routes.

Lauren Kurth had almost given up on finding it.

More than two months had passed since she awoke one Sunday morning to find that her car, a silver 1999 Toyota RAV4, had been stolen from the front curb of her Eureka home. 

“It’s not even a great car,” Kurth said ruefully. Still, it was her car. She’d owned it for roughly a decade, and she was pissed that someone took it. This was the second vehicle of hers that had been stolen. (The first one, a 1985 Toyota pickup truck, was never found.)

There was nothing to do but report it stolen and return to work the next day. Kurth works six days a week, and up to 12 hours per day, driving mail delivery routes as a City Carrier Assistant (CCA) for the U.S. Postal Service. 

“Basically, we cover for regulars when they’re out sick or on vacation,” she said. In practice, that means driving a variety of different routes, and on Friday, Kurth found herself on a McKinleyville route that she hadn’t driven in a while. She was near the intersection of Hiller Road and Patricia Lane when she spotted it: a silver RAV4 parked in the grass near an old trailer.

“I looked and I was like, ‘Oh, shit, that’s just like my car,’” Kurth recalled. “I did a double-take — a triple-take, even,” she said. Then she took a closer look. That chipped reflector on the back passenger side looked awfully familiar. And there was that perfectly circular crack in the windshield, busted from the inside by a bump from the nose of a kayak. She peered into the windows and saw that all the seatbelts had been chewed through — a byproduct of her dog’s anxiety.

“I had some very specific damage to that car,” Kurth said. 

Taking a break in her delivery route, she called the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office to report her find. Before the deputy showed up, Kurth confronted a man on the property who said the car was his. He claimed he’d just recently purchased it, and before he walked into the trailer Kurth told him that she’d already called the cops. She realized, in retrospect, that she probably shouldn’t have confronted the man.

The Sheriff’s Office confirmed that their emergency communications center got a 911 call from a U.S. Postal Service mail carrier on Friday afternoon. Deputies responded to the scene and spoke with both Kurth and the man who lived there.

“Through their investigation, deputies confirmed the vehicle was, in fact, her previously reported stolen vehicle,” Public Information Specialist Erin Inskip told the Outpost via email on Tuesday. “The vehicle had different license plates affixed to it in an apparent attempt to conceal its identity, a practice commonly referred to as ‘cold plating.’”

Deputies wound up arresting the resident, 40-year-old JD Schmidt, for possession of a stolen vehicle, and transferring him to the Humboldt County Correctional Facility. 

Kurth said her RAV4 is in pretty bad shape. The ignition has been removed entirely, one of the tires is flat and there’s evidence that the vehicle has been dragged on the rim. She’ll either have to replace the ignition and buy all new tires or sell it as-is for a few hundred dollars, taking a significant loss. (Since the car was so old, she only had liability insurance at the time it was stolen.)

The good news is that by working so many hours for USPS, she was able to afford a newer and nicer vehicle: a 2016 Subaru Crosstrek. Still, she’s not about to let this theft slide. Referring to the perpetrator, she said she will press charges.

“I don’t really care if he goes to jail,” Kurth said. “I just want retribution.”