Sometimes, justice just happens without the intervention of law enforcement.
There had been an ongoing series of rural mailbox vandalisms over a period of weeks on the rural roads outside the city limits in Kerrville when I was an officer there. The mailboxes were the standard sheet metal boxes with on wooden posts.
In a typical report on a Saturday or Sunday morning, all of the mailboxes for a mile or two along one side of a country road would have been knocked over. Tire tracks indicated a vehicle was leaving the pavement to intentionally crash into the mailboxes. We suspected a high school boy or boys out drinking late at night on weekends, but there were no witnesses or suspects.
However, one man who had lost a couple of mailboxes to the scheme took matters into his own hands. He had a section of oil well drill stem set into a large drum of cement buried where his mailbox stood. He mounted his new mailbox on top of the drill stem and then camouflaged the drill stem with some cheap fence slats so that the thing looked like it was mounted on a flimsy wood post.
One Sunday morning a few weeks later, he caught the culprit. On his way out of his ranch, he found an older model pickup truck had dead centered the new mailbox assembly. Of course, the drill stem had not given an inch.
The truck had apparently been going a good speed when it hit the drill stem. The truck had a heavy-duty pipe deer guard mounted across the whole front end of the truck, a common enough addition to the fronts of ranch trucks to minimize damage in collisions with deer in the herds that came out onto the shoulders of ranch roads at night. But the deer guard was no match for the drill stem set deep in concrete.
The truck had smashed forward onto the drill stem and come to rest with the mailbox assembly in the middle of the motor compartment of the truck. The motor itself was pushed back under the dashboard. The entire drivetrain had been shoved backwards on the frame so that the drive shaft had actually punched its way out the back of the differential.
But the funniest part was that the truck fenders had bent around the drill stem so that the two headlights were facing each other at the front of the wreck.
There was no sign of the driver, so apparently he had been uninjured enough to abandon the truck and depart on foot. It didn’t take long to identify one of the local high school boys as the likely owner/driver of the truck.
When a deputy arrived to talk to him, he denied any knowledge of the situation. He said he frequently left the keys in the ignition out on the farm so somebody must have snuck in and taken his truck for a joy ride.
Considering the fact that the old truck was uninsured and there was insufficient evidence to file criminal charges, no further investigation was conducted. The series of mailbox vandalisms came to an abrupt cessation and justice had been served!