There’s a particular flavor of automotive stupidity that only surfaces when someone stops making car payments, and a 21-year-old named Donovan Acklin just supplied a textbook example of it. According to the El Paso County Sheriff’s Office, deputies were called out to the 14400 block of Cassidy Drive in far east El Paso on June 18 for a reported stolen vehicle. The twist is that the vehicle had already been repossessed and was sitting on a lot waiting to be auctioned. The man who allegedly took it wasn’t a stranger with a slim jim. He was the car’s former owner.
Investigators tracked the vehicle down fast. By June 23, deputies found it parked at an apartment complex on the 13500 block of Eastlake Boulevard over in Horizon City, and they found Acklin with it. The Sheriff’s Office says he’d unlawfully entered the property to take the car and later admitted to stealing it. On June 25 detectives obtained warrants charging him with criminal mischief, criminal trespass, and theft of property involving a motor vehicle.
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Here’s the part worth teaching, because a surprising number of people genuinely believe that a car they’re financing is their car in the full, do-whatever-you-want sense. It isn’t. When you sign a retail installment contract or take out an auto loan, the lender records a lien and holds a security interest in the vehicle. You have possession and the right to use it, but the lender is the secured party. Miss enough payments to trigger default, and Texas law hands that lender a powerful tool.
That tool is self-help repossession. Under Texas Business & Commerce Code Section 9.609, a secured creditor can take the collateral back after default without going to court and without a judge signing off first, as long as they do it “without breach of the peace.” That’s the one meaningful limit. The repo agent can grab your car out of an open driveway or a public lot at three in the morning, but they can’t break into a locked garage, cut a chain, or physically fight you for it. Notably, if you show up and clearly tell them to stop before the repossession is complete, continuing anyway can itself become a breach of the peace under Texas case law. That protection runs in one direction, though. It restrains the repo agent. It does not give the debtor a green light to go retrieve the car later.
Once that vehicle is repossessed and hauled to a storage lot for auction, the former owner has no lawful right to possession anymore. So when you climb the fence, enter the property, and drive off in the car you used to make payments on, you are not “getting your car back.” In the eyes of the law you are stealing someone else’s property, plus trespassing to do it, plus whatever damage you cause on the way in. That’s exactly the stack of charges here. Texas grades theft by the value of what’s taken under Penal Code Section 31.03, and most drivable used vehicles land squarely in state jail felony territory, roughly the $2,500 to $30,000 band. This was never going to be a slap-on-the-wrist misdemeanor.
The genuinely frustrating thing is that the law offered this guy a legitimate off-ramp, and it’s one most people never hear about. Before a lender sells repossessed collateral, the debtor generally has a statutory right of redemption. You can pay off the full outstanding balance plus the lender’s reasonable costs of repossession and storage and get the vehicle back, cleanly and legally, right up until the moment it’s sold or the lender formally keeps it in satisfaction of the debt. Curing the default before repossession is even cheaper. Climbing a fence is the one option that turns a civil debt problem into a criminal record.
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And the financial hole doesn’t close just because the car is gone. When a lender auctions a repossessed vehicle, the sale proceeds get applied to your loan balance and costs. Auction cars almost never bring retail money, so borrowers are frequently left owing a deficiency balance on a car they no longer have. Stealing it back doesn’t erase that math. It just adds legal fees and bond costs on top.
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There’s an insurance wrinkle too that people miss. The second a car is repossessed, it isn’t yours to insure, and your policy’s interest in it evaporates. You can’t file a claim on a vehicle you don’t own and don’t lawfully possess, and taking it doesn’t reinstate any coverage. If something had happened during that Horizon City joyride, there’d be no policy standing behind it.
The practical takeaway for anyone circling the drain on a car payment: talk to the lender the instant you know you’re going to miss one, ask about deferment or a reworked payment schedule, and if repossession does happen, exercise your redemption rights through the paperwork instead of the parking-lot gate. A repossession is a bad month. A state jail felony is a bad decade.
Images Via: El Paso County Sheriff’s Office
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