There’s a particular kind of Sunday afternoon a golfer signs up for: a bucket of range balls, a slow front nine, maybe a beer at the turn. What the members at Lakeshore Country Club in Greece, New York got on June 21 was a stolen SUV plowing across their manicured turf with a sheriff’s cruiser in pursuit, and a driver who eventually decided the fastest exit was to bail out of the vehicle while it was still rolling.
According to the Monroe County Sheriff’s Office, the whole thing kicked off at 4:42 p.m. when a deputy got a License Plate Reader activation for a stolen 2019 Hyundai Tucson heading north on Lake Avenue near Latta Road. The deputy confirmed the vehicle had been reported stolen in Rochester, lit up the emergency lights, and the driver did what people in stolen cars tend to do — he stepped on it. The pursuit ran until the Tucson left the road, crossed onto the golf course, tore across a big stretch of the property, and shed enough hardware that its radiator ended up sitting on the driving range. The driver then jumped out of the moving SUV and ran on foot before deputies caught him.
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That driver, the Sheriff’s Office says, is 19-year-old Zachary Granito-Hertz of Rochester, whom the department flatly describes as a repeat offender “involved in multiple stolen vehicles and pursuits.”
The charge sheet is longer than the scorecard
Let’s talk about what “multiple charges” actually means here, because the specifics tell you how New York treats this kind of thing. Per the Sheriff’s Office, Granito-Hertz is charged with:
- Criminal Possession of Stolen Property in the Third Degree (Class D felony)
- Criminal Mischief in the Third Degree (Class E felony) — specifically for the damage to the golf course
- Unlawful Fleeing a Police Officer in a Motor Vehicle in the Third Degree (Class A misdemeanor)
- Obstructing Governmental Administration in the Second Degree (Class A misdemeanor)
- Reckless Driving (unclassified misdemeanor)
- Resisting Arrest (Class A misdemeanor)
- Fifteen traffic citations tied to the pursuit
A couple of these deserve unpacking. Criminal Possession of Stolen Property in the Third Degree, under New York Penal Law, generally applies once the value of the property crosses $3,000 — a threshold a running 2019 Tucson clears without breaking a sweat. As a Class D felony, it carries a potential state prison exposure measured in years, not months. That’s the heavyweight on the list.
The one that makes this story different from your average stolen-car pursuit is the Criminal Mischief charge, and the reason it’s a felony rather than a violation comes down to the golf course itself. Criminal Mischief in the Third Degree kicks in when the intentional property damage exceeds $250. Anyone who has priced out golf course maintenance knows that number is almost comically easy to blow past. A single tire track across a green isn’t a scuff you buff out — greens are grown on carefully built root zones, mowed to a height measured in thousandths of an inch, and a vehicle cutting across one can require the affected sections to be re-sodded or fully rebuilt. Fairway ruts, torn irrigation heads, damaged tee boxes — this is landscaping that gets billed like surgery. The felony grade here isn’t a stretch; it’s arithmetic.
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Then there are the fifteen traffic citations. That’s not a typo, and it’s not the department padding the file. Each moving violation during a pursuit — running lights, speeding, failing to signal, crossing into oncoming lanes, unsafe lane changes — gets written as its own ticket. String together a few miles of fleeing and the numbers add up fast.
Sheriff Todd K. Baxter put it plainly in the department’s statement: “This incident is another example of how one repeat offender’s decisions can place innocent members of our community at risk.” After processing, Granito-Hertz was arraigned in Monroe County CAP court and remanded on $5,000 cash bail.
Why a 2019 Tucson? Because Hyundai left the door unlocked
Here’s the piece that transforms this from a local police blotter item into something with real automotive weight: the choice of vehicle almost certainly wasn’t random.
A huge swath of Hyundai and Kia vehicles from roughly 2011 to 2022 rolled off the line without an engine immobilizer — the anti-theft chip, embedded in the vehicle’s electronics, that refuses to let the engine start unless it recognizes the correct key. Immobilizers have been effectively standard on the rest of the industry for two decades. Hyundai and Kia, on their turn-key (non-push-button) models, skipped them to save cost. That decision blew up in their faces when the so-called “Kia Challenge” spread across social media, showing anyone with a USB cable and a screwdriver how to pop the steering column and start these cars in seconds.
The scope of the exposure is staggering. A multistate settlement announced by state attorneys general required the automakers to equip all future U.S. vehicles with industry-standard immobilizers, offer free zinc-reinforced ignition cylinder protectors, and set aside restitution for owners whose cars were damaged by thieves. And critically, the Tucson is explicitly on the affected-models list — NHTSA’s own technical service bulletin documentation names the Tucson (in its LM, TL, and NX4 platform generations) among the vehicles covered by the anti-theft software campaign.
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If you want to know whether a specific Hyundai or Kia is vulnerable, the tell is simple: if it has a physical turn key rather than a push-button start, it’s the type that shipped without an immobilizer. Push-button cars already had the chip and were never part of this.
One important wrinkle for owners and buyers: NHTSA declined to issue a recall. The agency’s position, laid out to a coalition of state attorneys general, was that federal safety standards don’t actually require an immobilizer, and that criminal hotwiring isn’t a “defect” in the regulatory sense that triggers a mandatory recall. That’s a meaningful distinction. A recall obligates the manufacturer to fix every affected car for free, no strings. What Hyundai and Kia rolled out instead were “service campaigns” — voluntary software updates and hardware kits — which put more of the burden on owners to know about the fix and actually go get it.
The parts that matter if you own one
If you’re driving one of these Tucsons — or shopping for a used one — a few practical takeaways:
Get the software update, and get the ignition protector. The free software upgrade is designed to prevent the engine from starting without the key present. For cars that can’t take the software, the settlement provides reimbursement — up to $300 toward a steering wheel lock, glass-breakage alarm, or other aftermarket anti-theft hardware. Uptake on these fixes has historically been poor, largely because owners don’t know the fix exists.
Insurance is the sleeper problem. During the worst of the theft wave, some major insurers simply refused to write or renew coverage on these models in high-theft areas. If you’re buying a used Tucson from this era, don’t assume coverage is a formality — price the policy before you sign anything, and confirm the anti-theft software has been installed, because that can affect both eligibility and premium.
Resale value took a hit. The theft reputation dragged down used values on the affected Hyundai and Kia models. That cuts both ways: rough news if you’re selling, a potential bargain if you’re buying — provided you go in clear-eyed about the security work the car needs.
The class-action money is still tied up. As of early 2026, the underlying $145 million settlement had cleared the Ninth Circuit, but an objector appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, which is delaying distribution of funds to class members. If you filed a claim, patience is the operative word.
The bigger pattern
There’s a reason a stolen SUV ended up on a golf course in Greece, and it isn’t just one teenager’s bad afternoon. When you build millions of vehicles that a determined kid can start in under a minute, and then a viral video hands out the instructions, you get a self-sustaining supply of easy-to-steal cars feeding exactly this kind of joyride-and-pursuit cycle. The LPR system that flagged this particular Tucson is the flip side of that coin — automated license plate readers have become a standard tool for spotting stolen vehicles the instant they roll past a camera, which is precisely how a deputy knew to attempt that traffic stop in the first place.
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The golf course damage will get billed to somebody, the felony charges will work their way through Monroe County court, and a radiator will get scrubbed off a driving range. But the reason a 2019 Tucson was sitting there stealable in the first place traces back to a cost-cutting decision made in a boardroom years ago — and it’s a decision drivers of these cars are still paying for, one steering wheel lock at a time.