SPOKANE, Wash. — Five years ago, Katie Nickel says she walked out of a grocery store in Bellingham to find an empty spot where her car once stood. It took a second for it to sink in but she soon recognized the car had been stolen.
"Once I realized it was gone, I literally sat down and cried in the middle of the parking lot," Nickel said.
She went to Bellingham Police, who told her the odds of getting it back were pretty slim.
"I was not getting my hopes up but I still held out hope," Nickel said. "Every time I saw a little red Honda drive by on the road, even all the way up to just a couple weeks ago, I'd be bitter."
She had reason to be bitter, too. The car theft resulted in a a series of even bigger losses in her life, she said.
"I ended up losing my job because I couldn't make it to work and then I lost my home because I couldn't work," she said. "So it was rough. It was really rough there for a while."
She eventually got back on her feet and moved on with her life.
Then five years later, she said something bizarre came in the mail: a parking ticket on the car that had been stolen from her so long ago.
It came from a private lot in downtown Spokane nearly 250 miles away.
"At first I was like, 'What is this? I've never been to Spokane,'" Nickel said. "So I called them, I got it revoked, and I looked over it more thoroughly, and I noticed the license plate looked a little familiar. And so I back-checked it, and I was like, oh my gosh. This is my Honda's license plate."
The parking company forgave the ticket and offered to send her the photo they had taken of it, she said. The photo was a blurred mess.
But it still renewed hope in Katie.
"It's like a fire just got lit," she said.
Nickel said she called Crime Check but was nervous it wouldn't be a priority.
KREM 2 asked Spokane Police about it and Sergeant Terry Preuninger offered to help look into it himself.
"I'm also probably going to run down and just see where the ticket was issued. See if we see any cameras. See if they have any kind of attendant parking. Basically look for – it's a long shot for clues – but anything that would lead us to find out who had the car," he said.
Nickel has also done some detective work on her own, she said.
"I literally called every business on that block, seeing if that had any surveillance," she said.
They didn't but Preuninger says that doesn't mean none can be found.
"Sometimes we get lucky," he said. "I've worked cases where you go to adjoining businesses, and you have no video or the video's not very good quality, but somebody else has a much better better system a little bit farther away."
He also said a case like this, where a stolen car shows up on a parking ticket, is extremely rare.
"Most of the time, once it's gone over a year or two and we find them, it's in the backyard under a tarp, or we find VIN plates or pieces of a vehicle," Preuninger said.
Due to the poor quality of that photo, there is still the possibility it's not Katie's original car and only her license plate. But she said getting the car back isn't really her priority anymore. Instead her priority is justice.
"So many emotions were going through my head. I couldn't believe that after five years, they're still trucking around with my car," Nickel said. "First there was a lot of anger. And then pity, almost, now. Just what has to go wrong with your life to ruin someone else's like that?"
According to Nickel, the car is a red Honda sedan with license plate AFU0894.
