Chronicle story helped man retrieve stolen car
Ralf Schubert paced around his Acura Integra on Friday, surveying the damage. The 90-year-old San Jose resident had assumed he’d never see his beloved car again. Thieves in San Francisco had stolen it in late September, while his nephew was using it to visit friends in the Mission.
On Thursday, though, he got a call: His nephew’s friends had found the car, after reading a Chronicle story revealing San Francisco’s practice of ticketing vehicles without checking the license plate numbers to see if they had been reported stolen.
The friends entered Schubert’s plate, “ACURALF,” into the city’s ticket look-up website and — bingo! The Acura had been slapped with a citation the day before at Hayes and Broderick streets in NoPa. All that was left was to retrieve the missing auto — and see how badly it had been treated while away.
The Chronicle reported Wednesday that city parking control officers generally do not compare the license plates of vehicles parked illegally to databases of stolen cars, even though some other cities perform such checks. The phenomenon has led some victims to try to find their own cars by checking for parking tickets.
Just hours after the initial story was published online, Mayor London Breed ordered the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency to work with city police to fix the problem.
It’s not clear how long that will take. For now, people who have their car stolen in San Francisco might want to consider Schubert’s tale.
The ordeal started Sept. 29, when he got a “somber” call from his nephew, Mark Salvatore, 63, the day after he borrowed it, telling him that it had been stolen.
“Adjacent to a heart attack,” Schubert recalled.
Salvatore had walked outside that morning to avoid a street-sweeping ticket on a San Francisco street. He’d flown to California for his uncle’s 90th birthday.
As he always does when he comes to the Bay Area, he visited his friends Chris and Mark Kapka, two brothers who live in the Mission.
But the Acura has vanished. He asked Chris Kapka if he thought SFMTA would have towed it. No, Kapka responded, not for street cleaning. That would just be a ticket.
That’s when he realized the vehicle had been boosted. He didn’t know what to say. “It was horrible,” he said. “It was terrible.”
Two weeks later, the Kapka brothers read the Chronicle’s article on SFMTA’s ticketing of stolen vehicles. They recalled Schubert’s distinctive vanity plate and typed it into the city website.
“Sure enough,” Mark Kapka said, “it pops up.” They called police, who showed up within an hour to the address on the ticket and towed the car to the city’s impound lot in Daly City.
Getting the car out was yet another challenge.
“I was absolutely flummoxed,” Schubert said. His nephew’s friends helped him navigate the impound release process, and on Friday, he finally got the car out and onto a tow truck back to San Jose.
Back in the South Bay, Schubert discovered that thieves had removed his catalytic converter, surely so they could sell its metal. And they had clearly crashed into something — hard. A headlight was smashed, the front bumper was crumpled and the hood was battered and bent, tethered to the frame with a cord. Inside was a broken meth pipe and an empty bottle of Orange Crush.
Still, it seemed salvageable, Schubert said.
The car is old but special to Schubert, who has lovingly maintained it over the last three decades.
He’s always loved cars — so much so that went to school to study industrial design so he could pursue a career shaping them. Over the decades, he’s had a lot of cars and loved every one of them.
Inside his home, models and photos of some of his former cars line the walls and countertops. A 1953 Studebaker Starliner, a 1965 Chevy Corvette, even a model of his 1993 Acura Integra, in gleaming red. There’s also the Volkswagen Beetle he bought in 1965, allowing him drive 17,000 miles through 21 countries in Europe and North Africa over six months.
He loved the Integra — a fast, well-made car that remains popular among enthusiasts. He’d driven it to Palm Springs, Los Angeles, San Diego and Seattle.
The theft in September wasn’t the first time he’d almost lost it. Twice before, about a decade ago, thieves had stolen the vehicle from outside of his home. Each time, he’d managed to get it back.
On Friday, as he took in the worst damage the car had ever seen, his face fell. Cracks spiderwebbed across the windshield. The roof was stove-in and the sunroof was damaged too, which means he’ll need to repair the electrical components as well.
“That’s serious,” Schubert observed. Likely a total. The repairs would probably cost north of $10,000, and for a bit more, he could probably buy a used car. But Oct. 8 had marked his 90th birthday and, now, that much work was just daunting.
“If I were 20 years younger, I would do it,” he said. “But I’m not.”
It was probably time to face reality.
“It’s a Pyrrhic victory,” he said. “Someone brought my baby back, but she’s missing both her arms.”