“I just wanted my gym bag:” owner of stolen truck speaks about standoff

BOWLING GREEN, Ky. – On Monday morning, a truck was stolen and taken on a joyride, and now the owner of the truck is sharing his experience.

Seth Harper had his truck stolen from work on Monday between 6 and 7 a.m., which he initially thought was a joke.

After his sales meeting, Harper walked out of the building with some coworkers when he saw his truck was gone. He immediately turned to his friends for an answer. Harper said after walking the property, he called it in to the Bowling Green Police Department.

Harper said he and his coworkers then followed the location of Harper’s MacBook inside of the vehicle by tracking it via the Find My app on his iPhone. After a lot of turning around, they followed behind Kentucky State Police to Russellville, where the thief parked in a family member’s driveway on Coopertown Road in Russellville.

With the truck in-between two parked vehicles and the perpetrator refusing to exit, a standoff ensued.

Harper had weapons in the truck as well, which then prompted a heightened sense of urgency from law enforcement. In a release by KSP, trooper say the fleeing suspect brandished a weapon during the chase.

Eventually, the KSP Special Response Team got involved, and after some hours, the standoff would ultimately end in the SRT deploying pepper gas and a flashbang.

Harper said he sat in the nearby church parking lot shortly after the man parked the truck and was there until the ordeal ended. He said he didn’t expect this kind of thing to happen in Bowling Green, especially so early on a Monday morning, but he’s glad that no one got hurt.