Trey Merrick, owner of the Purple Rabbit Emporium and Art in downtown Sapulpa, went out to start his box truck one day and found that the catalytic converter had been removed at some point during the night.
“They cut through fence and came in. It was 4:30 in the morning,” Merrick said. “Clear view of the cameras. They didn’t care.”
Several days later, the Car-Mart dealership on Taft Ave. reported to the Sapulpa Police that seven of their vehicles had their catalytic converters removed overnight. Car-Mart has not responded to Sapulpa Times for comment.
In the daily call logs for SPD, missing catalytic converters are becoming increasingly more common. “We have had quite a few of these thefts,” Sapulpa Police Chief Mike Reed told Sapulpa Times on Wednesday. “It’s been occurring in multiple cities in the Tulsa Metro area. It’s definitely become a thing in the last month or so.”
The theft of catalytic converters isn’t at all limited to the Sooner State. A recent New York Times story on the subject reported that catalytic converters are full of precious metals like palladium, which has sent prices are soaring as regulators try to tame emissions.
Last year, the price of palladium quintupled to $2,875 an ounce, and is now hovering between $2,000 and $2,500 an ounce, above the price of gold. Rhodium—another of the precious metals found in catalytic converters—has gone from about $640 an ounce five years ago to a record $21,900 an ounce this year—an increase of more than 3,000 percent, and roughly 12 times the price of gold.
The theft has created a sort of black market for the converters, which can be sawn off the underside of a vehicle in virtually minutes, and sold to scrap yards for several hundred dollars. The scrap yards then sell them to recyclers who can extract the metals.
Sapulpa isn’t the only Tulsa metro area that has seen a surge in catalytic converter thefts. In December, Tulsa Police reported that converters had been stolen off of five mobile units for the Oklahoma Blood Institute. Broken Arrow Police Officer Chris Walker also reported a surge in thefts, saying that finding the perpetrators was difficult because converters are one of the parts that don’t have identification numbers on them. In Oklahoma City, two men were arrested after trying to sell over 100 stolen catalytic converters to a recycler.
The reward may be high, but that’s not the say the risk isn’t, as evidenced last February when a man trying to steal the catalytic converter off of a Toyota Prius was crushed to death when the car fell on him.
