Last June, Colorado newcomer Eliska Smiga grew wide-eyed by its beauty, but blind to its monstrous auto theft problem.

“I came from small-town Texas where you leave your doors unlocked,” Smiga said.

Her love affair with the mountains soured when in her 2014 Hyundai sedan was stolen twice in a four-week period.

“The welcome wagon was pulled out from underneath me,” she said.

The first incident was a shock. Smiga and her partner were headed out for Bible study when they realized the Elantra had disappeared from its parking space, a heap of broken glass in its spot.

The sedan turned up in the same parking lot five days later, its back passenger window busted and the steering column ripped out — but drivable.

Anyone who believes lightning never strikes twice in the same place should talk to Smiga.

Determined to salvage her paid-for car, she stuck a screwdriver into the ignition and drove it to Bodies by Brown. The auto body shop was crowded with other stolen cars waiting for repair. Days later, Smiga got a call from a woman who worked at the shop with bad news.

“I don’t know how to say this,” she told her. “Your car has been stolen from our lot.”

Bodies by Brown’s lot was fenced, but someone got into the area and took advantage of the Elantra’s still-broken window and drove it away.

Turns out Smiga had chosen not only Colorado’s most targeted vehicle for theft in 2023, but the Miramar Apartments complex — on the border of Denver and Aurora at Quebec Way and East Arkansas — is in a hot-spot area for auto theft, according to Colorado Auto Theft Prevention Authority (CAPTA) statistics.

“It’s incredible when you realize that within a two-mile radius of those apartments, you end up with 6% of all thefts in the entire Denver region,” said Cale Gould, the public outreach coordinator for the authority.

We’re No. 1 … or close

Colorado has been a known hot-spot-state for stolen vehicles for several years. It led the country in 2022 per capita with 42,000 stolen vehicles, but 2023 saw a 21% decrease — the equivalent of 33,000 vehicles swiped.

It’s still too early to tell whether the lower 2023 numbers robbed Colorado of its unenviable No. 1 ranking because total stats for 2023 are lagging in other states. But authorities predict that once the dust is cleared, we will sit square in the top five.

“We are still on the high end of the list,” Gould said. “Other states have gone up. It’s going to be a data race.”

He alluded to new, stiffer penalties for auto theft, which reclassifies the statutes, more police to catch car thieves, and the fact that cities are adding new technology like license-plate reader cameras, or LPRs.

An Atlanta company called Flock has sold its state-of-the art LPRs to at least 60 Colorado towns and cities, company spokesperson Conner Metz told The Denver Gazette. He explained that once the cameras zero in on a stolen car, that plate is plugged into the National Crime Information Center database, which is maintained by the FBI and sends texts to officers to be on the lookout.

The Flock LPRs are also linked to Amber and Silver Alert databases, which help locate potentially kidnapped children and missing persons — specifically elderly people with Alzheimer’s disease, dementia or other disabilities.

Denver

It costs the city of Denver $600,000 per year to investigate auto theft. The average cost to victims is around $10,000. Auto theft was down 19% in Denver last year with 12,100 vehicles stolen compared to 14,907 in 2022.

Last week, Denver Police Chief Ron Thomas and Denver Mayor Mike Johnston gave a joint press conference to announce that the force will install 109 Flock cameras across the city.

Currently, Colorado’s capital city with the worst auto theft problem has only two of them.

Thomas said that the force “will not be shy” about where the cameras will be located. They will be placed in hot spot areas with the highest rates of theft, specifically along Colfax Avenue, downtown and parts of West Denver, he said.

The new ones will be installed in the next four months.

The high levels of car theft happen because of a drop in police staff, Johnston said, a broader pattern of rising crime and the fact that certain car designs are easier to steal.

His own car was stolen in November. He is encouraging citizens to register their cars with the Denver Police through a program called DenverTrak.

“We want to make sure that there’s not one sneaky route to get out of Denver that every thief knows they can use without being detected,” said Johnston. “We want to make sure we can find them wherever they go.”

Castle Rock, a model

In 2015, the Castle Rock Police Department was one of the first in the state to take action with these license plate readers. Its success “led a lot of other cities to seriously look at their model,” CAPTA’s Gould said.

In 2021, the police department moved to stationary license plate readers as an innovative way to fight all types of crimes. When it came to auto theft, it appeared to have an immediate effect, as the force saw reductions over the next two years.

According to CAPTA, in 2022 Castle Rock saw a 15% decrease in auto thefts. This followed a 25% decrease of auto thefts in 2021.

The department now has 32 LPRs throughout town, and a network of cameras monitored by its real-time crime center.

Northglenn

Last month in Northglenn, license plate readers played a role in helping police apprehend a thief who unknowingly stole a car with a 4-month-old baby girl strapped to a car seat in the back.

James Burlison, a spokesman for the Northglenn Police Department, said the incident started in a business complex in the 11900 block of Washington Street when a vehicle was stolen from the parking lot.

Around 40 minutes later, two Good Samaritans called police to report they found the infant unharmed in her car seat in the middle of the road in the 10400 block of Carlile Street — which is about two miles south of where the car was stolen.

Northglenn police put out a BOLO (be on the lookout) on the vehicle and used the Flock technology to locate the vehicle.

Northglenn has 10 Flock cameras around the city, but it was a Flock camera in neighboring Thornton that picked up a hit on the stolen vehicle. Thornton police pursued the suspect and stopped the car in the 11300 block of Riverdale Drive in unincorporated Adams County, Burlison said.

In a separate incident Jan. 4, Flock cameras helped Northglenn police apprehend two people in a stolen vehicle as they stopped at a gas station to fill up. The driver was in possession of a stolen handgun and had a nationwide warrant out of Texas for sex assault on a child, Burlison said. The front passenger provided numerous fake names but admitted to knowing the vehicle was stolen.

Both subjects were arrested and booked into the county jail on charges related to the firearm, the stolen vehicle and warrants, according to Burlison.

Lakewood

The Lakewood Police Department announced a new program providing residents with free tools, including GPS tracking devices and a club to place over a steering wheel and a window decal to deter anyone interested in making off with a vehicle.

Lakewood police spokesperson John Romero said that so many people — around 450 — responded to their Facebook post that they had to stop advertising the program until they could catch up.

Twice bitten, twice shy

Eliska Smiga never found her Hyundai, but she has moved on determined that she won’t get hit a third time.

Last week, she and her partner relocated to a new neighborhood, which she researched to make sure auto theft was lower than where she lived before.

She used her insurance money to buy a Nissan Rogue with button starts, which “is not on any list of easily stolen cars.”

Somewhere, her 2014 black Hyundai Elantra sits, twice stolen-now and forgotten. She said it’s made for a great story to tell at parties.

“You can only laugh,” she said.