Dealership manager, employee hit by thieves

HOUSTON – The general manager and employee of a Northside boat dealership were hit by a pair of thieves after cashing payroll checks last Friday.

The burglaries happened at Premiere Yamaha Boating Center off the North Freeway.

"Pull in, click, click, boom, they were gone," said general manager Mark Kuchera. "They were in and out of our parking lot in less than three minutes with all the cash."

Kuchera said the dealership was in the process of closing one bank account and opening another, so he and other employees had to cash their paychecks that day. Kuchera said he and the other employees left the bank and drove back to the dealership, parking their vehicles in back of the dealership.

"They would have had to have seen us inside the bank or outside the bank and then followed us all the way," Kuchera said.

Kuchera said he and another employee left the cash in their vehicles.

"I had only planned on being here for about 10 minutes," Kuchera said.

Surveillance camera captured what happened next. A person in a white pickup with no front license plate or registration sticker parks in the front parking lot and watches people come and go. That person eventually drives into the back lot and up to Kuchera's truck.

"The Sheriff's Department is actually the one that noticed they had popped my lock," Kuchera said.

The money was gone and Kuchera said when he checked his cameras he saw there was a second thief in a Saturn Vue.

"Boom, breaks the window, crawls in," Kuchera said.

That thief broke the window of an employee's truck and made off with his paycheck. Both the truck and SUV left the dealership before anyone knows what happened. Kuchera said what happened at his dealership should serve as a warning to anyone withdrawing money from the bank.

"Don't take the same roads back, take a different pattern. Take a left instead of a right and just see if somebody is following you," Kuchera said.

Unfortunately, the Sheriff’s Office does not have a lot to go on; both of the bandits' vehicles had paper plates and it was difficult to make out faces from the surveillance video.


About the Author:

Award winning investigative journalist who joined KPRC 2 in July 2000. Husband and father of the Master of Disaster and Chaos Gremlin. “I don’t drink coffee to wake up, I wake up to drink coffee.”