Stealing Eight Corvettes from the Factory Can Pay “Big.” Or Not.

Memo to car thieves: Even if you figure out the stealing part, you may need to work on the hiding part.

This advice might have helped Deantae Walker, 21, who apparently traveled from his home in Westland, Michigan, a suburb of Detroit, to Chevrolet’s Corvette factory in Bowling Green, Kentucky. According to Louisville TV station WHAS, Walker, a suspect in the theft of not one, not two, but eight new Corvettes from the Bowling Green plant Saturday night, was arrested after a foot chase by the Bowling Green Police Department. According to the police report, the thieves—and yes, that’s plural—cut through the fence around a back lot and apparently drove what police say were $1.2 million worth of cars out of the hole.

The theft was discovered when an officer with the Warren County Sheriff’s Office was patrolling the parking lot of a Bowling Green apartment complex when he noticed a new, maroon Corvette parked in the lot, window sticker in place. He figured it looked kind of stolen, and he had the Bowling Green police contact plant security to see if they were missing a new, $160,000 car. (This likely would’ve been a nicely optioned Z06 based on the price reference, though a new ZR1 in a color that matches the description was supposedly among the eight stolen).

They performed an inventory and said why yes, now that you mention it, we are, and that car is one of them. From there on, the story gets even stranger. According to WHAS, two of the suspects visited the office of an auto transport company and arranged for the immediate transport of a 2017 Corvette to Michigan. When the driver arrived at the pickup location, a Lowe’s Home Improvement parking lot, he was told by a man who WHAS identified as Walker that instead of a 2017 Corvette, he was to transport three new 2025 Corvettes, and the sooner the better.

The transport driver “said the men were rushing him while he was loading the vehicles, and he noticed they had damage on the bottom of them,” according to the WHAS story. “He told police the transaction felt ‘weird.’”

Police located Walker in the parking lot, and he ran, but not fast enough. According to Lexington TV station WLEX, Walker “tripped and fell and, as a result, was placed into handcuffs.” Another suspect, driving a Jeep with Ohio tags, escaped. It’s unknown whether he has been apprehended. Apparently, most of the other stolen Corvettes were also found in nearby apartment parking lots. All were recovered.

At last report, Walker was in jail, facing charges of third-degree fleeing or evading police, resisting police, first-degree criminal mischief, and three counts of receiving stolen property worth $10,000 or more.

As quoted by WHAS, when he made it to Warren County Regional Jail, Walker, who refused to speak to to the arresting police, made this comment, apparently not on the advice of an attorney: “If I would have made it back to Michigan, I would have been paid big.”

The investigation is ongoing.