*This article was reprinted with permission from OOIDA. View the original article, published February 2012.

A woman’s plea for help convinced OOIDA member Alan Holcomb of Nichols, IA, to crawl out of his sleeper berth and into the driver’s seat of his truck.

He found out the hard way that it was a ruse. In less than two minutes’ time, Holcomb was robbed at gunpoint of his wallet, containing about $300 cash, his cellphone and his laptop while parked at the Wendy’s Restaurant on Front Street in Kansas City, MO, around 11:45 p.m. on Monday, Feb. 13.

“I was completely taken off guard,” he told Land Line on Tuesday, Feb. 14. “I was going to be a nice guy. She was needing some money for gas because she had fallen on hard times.”

After rolling down the window to hand her a few dollars, Holcomb said the woman backed away from his door. He then opened the door to hand it to her, when a man jumped up and stuck a gun in his face.

“It was over in less than two minutes,” Holcomb said. “I should have never rolled down the window.”

After calling out on his CB for someone to call the police, Holcomb said he remembered that he had a spare phone in his truck. He decided to activate the new phone while waiting for the Kansas City, MO, police to arrive.

“My first mistake was rolling the window down. My second mistake was activating the spare phone because it deactivated the GPS on my other phone so the phone company couldn’t ping it to find out its location,” he said.

While another driver parked next to Holcomb didn’t see the robbery, he did see three people dive under his tractor-trailer and run off.

Over the years, Holcomb said he has parked at the Wendy’s, which has about six spaces, many times because the nearby Flying J Travel Plaza is usually packed.

“If you get there after 5 p.m., sometimes after 2 p.m., there are no spaces,” he said. “There is just not near enough good secure truck parking in the Kansas City area.”

Holcomb said he’s been following efforts to pass Jason’s Law legislation to add critical truck parking across the United States. The U.S. House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee’s highway bill, introduced on Jan. 31, includes provisions for a pilot program for truck parking. 

“I get OOIDA’s Calls to Action and I call my representatives,” he said. “Now after this happened, I need to make a call again and remind them. We need other people to call and raise as much heck in DC as we can.”

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