Eastbourne hospital staff member has car part stolen while at work

Ruth Sheppard had been working at the Eastbourne District General Hospital, where she is a radiology department assistant, before realising that her converter was missing.

Ms Sheppard said, “My car literally had an MOT on Saturday (January 23) so I knew it was fine because weirdly enough my partner had said that they mentioned how big the exhaust was on the car for the age of the vehicle.

“I got to work at 8.30 on Monday morning and then got in it at 5pm to go home, turned the engine on and you know when you have got a blown exhaust? It is so loud. It vibrated through the car so loudly that I turned it off straight away and I thought, ‘That’s a bit weird. It was fine this morning. What could have possibly happened?’”

Ms Sheppard called her partner and didn’t feel comfortable driving the car so asked if he could come and meet her.

She said, “He turns up, we drive back to his house. He looks underneath and he says, ‘Somebody has cut your catalytic converter off. That’s why it sounds like a blown exhaust. They have just gone underneath it and have taken the whole thing.’”

Ms Sheppard, who was parked in a nearby car park, said, “They can cut a catalytic converter off of a car so quickly. It takes me longer to do my teeth than it does for them to take a converter off a car. That is the ridiculous thing about it.”

There were 288 reports of stolen catalytic converters in 2020 in Sussex as of mid-December.

This is an increase of 89 per cent from the year before, according to recent data.

Ms Sheppard said, “It’s sadly happening more and more. My other half said he is going to put the car up again on a ramp and put a metal plate over it to stop that happening again.

“He is going to bolt it on so it’s going to stop them getting to it and I think more people are trying to do that.”

After hearing about what had happened Ms Sheppard’s colleague all chipped in with donations to help pay for a replacement.

Ms Sheppard said, “On Monday I was crying with sadness because I was so upset that somebody felt that they could do that to somebody.

“I was really upset about that, it was my car. It is not cheap to get these things replaced but I have been blown away by human kindness.

“LMW motors in Westham have said, ‘If you can fix the car, bring it down and you can use our ramps.’ So that was amazing and my colleagues today have had a whip round and have raised some money to help me pay for it.”

On Tuesday (January 26) two men were arrested in West Sussex in connection with catalytic converter thefts in the county but Ms Sheppard understands that it is hard to track down who might have done this to her car.

She said, “Because it is so quick I wouldn’t myself think anything of it if I saw two people by a car. I would just think that one of the staff members has got something wrong with their car and somebody else is helping them do something about it. You wouldn’t even think to look.”