Here’s a tidy little Central Valley crime story that doubles as a lesson in why your decade-old Honda is more desirable to a thief than you’d think, and why running from the cops in a low-slung sedan across farm country is a plan with a short shelf life.
According to the Visalia Police Department, it started around 7:47 a.m. when someone reported that their 2013 Honda Accord had been stolen overnight from a home. Before officers could even take the full report, the owner called back with a hot tip: the Accord was sitting in the trailhead parking lot near Lovers Lane and St. Johns Parkway, two people in it. As officers rolled up, the car took off west on St. Johns Parkway. Officers caught up with it heading north on Ben Maddox Way at the edge of town and lit it up. The driver declined the invitation to stop.
The pursuit ran west on Avenue 328 into the Patterson Tract area, where — and this is the part that ends most rural chases — the driver turned down a dead-end dirt road and tried to bull through a barbed-wire fence. That disabled the car. The driver bailed into an orchard and lost a brief foot race to officers, who arrested 31-year-old Ramiro Espindola. The passenger, 38-year-old Angelina Grajiola, was still in the Accord and was taken into custody too. Espindola was booked into the Tulare County Adult Pre-Trial Facility on charges including unlawfully taking or driving a vehicle, receiving a stolen vehicle, resisting an executive officer by force, vandalism, and felony evading. Grajiola was cited for possession of a controlled substance.
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Now the parts you can actually use.
Start with the car, because “2013 Accord stolen overnight” tells a mechanical story. The ninth-generation Accord left the factory with a transponder immobilizer — the engine won’t start unless the key’s chip is recognized. That’s meaningful, because it means this wasn’t a screwdriver-in-the-column job like you’d pull on a 1990s Civic. Overnight theft of an immobilizer-equipped Honda almost always means one of a few things: the thieves got hold of a key (spare in the glovebox, fob grabbed during a break-in, valet key nobody remembers), the car was flat-bedded away whole, or an actual key was cut and programmed. The takeaway for owners of any keyed-immobilizer car: your weakest link is the key, not the ignition. Don’t leave a spare in the cabin, and treat your house keys and car keys as a linked security problem.
Why an aging Accord at all? It’s not glamour — it’s liquidity. Accords and Civics are among the most-stolen vehicles in America year after year, and the reason is boring economics. Honda built millions of them, so the parts demand is bottomless: doors, headlights, airbags, wheels, catalytic converters, engines. A stolen Accord isn’t a car to a chop operation, it’s a shelf of inventory that fits thousands of other cars on the road. High volume plus interchangeable parts equals easy money, which is exactly why the humble commuter Honda gets lifted more than plenty of flashier metal.
The “drove through a barbed-wire fence, disabling the vehicle” line is doing more work than it looks. Barbed wire is genuinely good at stopping a car: it wraps around spinning wheels and axles and binds the drivetrain, while the posts and taut strands shred low-hanging bumper covers, puncture tires, and can tear into the radiator and condenser packed at the front of a sedan. Add a dirt road and a low-clearance Accord high-centers on the first decent berm. It’s not cinematic, but it’s effective.
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On the legal side, felony evading is worth understanding because people assume you have to hurt someone to earn the felony. You don’t. Under Vehicle Code 2800.2, fleeing with “willful or wanton disregard” is spelled out to include either committing three or more point-count traffic violations during the chase or simply causing property damage while fleeing. Plowing through a fence is textbook property damage, and it carries up to three years in state prison on that count alone — separate from the stolen-car and resisting charges stacked on top.
Finally, the insurance footnote for anyone who recovers a stolen car this way. Comprehensive coverage handles theft and the theft-related damage, so a recovered-but-wrecked car is claimable — but only if you carried comprehensive, not bare liability. And before you drive a recovered vehicle again, have it inspected: check for VIN tampering, sweep it for any tracker the thieves left behind, and remember that whatever was in the glovebox — registration, insurance card, garage remote — went on a field trip with your home address attached.
Images Via: Visalia PD