On Tuesday afternoon, just hours after his girlfriend awoke to find her Chevrolet Trailblazer's passenger window smashed, its sound system lifted, a customer entered Eric Ford's place of business and asked for some help.
Ford, 26, works at Mobile Audio Designs at 2701 N. 27th St., where they install car stereos.
From there, the story goes where one might expect it to go.
Anthony Trang, 21, 2912 Beacon Hills Circle, asked Ford to install some cables to a DVD player in his car.
"Yeah, man, just bring the DVD player in here," Ford said he told him.
Trang did, and there was the Clarion NX501 deck Ford had told police was stolen Tuesday morning.
Ford's reaction: "You gotta be kidding me."
The 2002 Trailblazer was parked in an open garage at a south Lincoln apartment building early Tuesday when about $2,300 in equipment was taken, including the amp, a subwoofer, three iPods, the multimedia player plus, Ford said, about 30 quarters from a change box.
He said the player was part of a multimedia and navigation system of which there are only two in the region. And the Massive Audio 5-by-7-inch amplifier that was taken from the SUV was one of only four in town, he said.
Because of that, Ford thought otherwise when an officer told him Tuesday morning how unlikely it was that the stolen items would be recovered. He said he told the officer he had a good feeling something would turn up.
But he wasn't expecting the alleged thief to ask for help reinstalling them.
"I was kind of upset, but I was kind of laughing about it," Ford said Wednesday.
He called police from the store, he said, and officers arrived in about five minutes.
Lincoln Police Officer Katie Flood said police recovered all but one iPod, and they also found a rifle, subwoofer amp and tools that were reported stolen from a truck in north Lincoln that same night.
Trang was arrested on suspicion of theft, possession of a stolen firearm and being a felon in possession of a firearm.
