Calgary woman says car thieves used tracker to follow her home to try to steal her SUV

Nadine Harris says its been a stressful few weeks filled with sleepless nights since she caught someone trying to steal her vehicle  from outside her home in northwest Calgary.

That’s because she’s come to believe she was scouted, stalked, and repeatedly targeted by the same group of car thieves.

“Do you know how much weight I’ve lost just doing laps in my own house looking out windows,” said Harris.

It happened around noon on Jan. 12. Harris was working from home and noticed a vehicle pull up parallel to her red SUV parked out front of her house. 

She says the vehicle then backed up about a metre and a half and stopped in front of her neighbour’s home. She assumed they were visiting next door.

But then something suspicious caught her attention.

“All of a sudden I looked at my vehicle and I saw a shadow kind of going from the front to the back seat and then I went, ‘Oh my, somebody's in my vehicle,’" said Harris.

She panicked, grabbed her keys, and ran outside. She said she didn’t have time to fear for her life.

“I think I was more scared of losing the vehicle than I was of them, to be honest,” said Harris.

Once outside she heard a man yelling “abort” from the vehicle parked in front of her neighbour’s house. 

The person in her SUV then jumped out of a smashed-out, driver-side back window, hopped into the other vehicle and they drove off.

Pleased she had thwarted thieves — but angry it had happened in broad daylight, outside her home, and left her with a hefty repair bill — she reported the incident to police.

But those feelings paled in comparison to what she would go through after learning the extent these thieves would go to in order to track down her vehicle and then try to steal it more than once.

Harris says when she took her vehicle to a shop to replace her back window, staff found a GPS tracker on the windshield, tucked under the wipers.