Deputy Sheriff ‘Jane Doe’ reported stolen SUV in crash involving mystery poodle
In another twist, a police report said the city-leased vehicle was reported stolen by an unnamed woman – who may be a top deputy. Sheriff Rochelle Bilal and police have both launched internal probes.
Philadelphia Sheriff Rochelle Bilal disclosed this week that she is conducting an internal investigation into how her staff failed to notify city fleet officials that an SUV assigned to her deputy had allegedly been stolen and wrecked.
But new details about the four-car crash in West Philly last summer — first reported Monday by The Inquirer — shed light on the bizarre series of events, while raising more questions about how the case was mishandled.
The Inquirer has learned that the high-ranking official in Bilal’s office who was assigned the SUV as a take-home vehicle was, unusually, not identified by name in a police report filed days after the wreck.
Witnesses said the 2024 Ford Expedition was speeding down Cedar Avenue around 6:47 a.m. on Aug. 10 — with police-style emergency lights and sirens activated — when the driver blew through a light at 57th Street and was struck by a car that had a green light. The Expedition hit a parked pickup truck, which then hit another parked vehicle.
The driver who emerged from the SUV was not a deputy. He was described by witnesses as a young man in a tank top carrying what appeared to be a brown or light-colored poodle. He fled the scene with the dog.
Police failed to promptly investigate the crash of the city-leased vehicle, and no charges were filed. The incident also eluded scrutiny from the Philadelphia Department of Fleet Services until January, when someone at the sheriff’s office requested a replacement vehicle.
That request prompted an investigation into the whereabouts of the prior SUV, according to a city official who was not authorized to discuss the matter publicly and spoke on the condition of anonymity.
Bilal has declined to disclose the identity of the deputy to whom the car was assigned.
On Aug. 13, three days after the crash, police responded to a report of a car theft on Osage Avenue. A woman there reported that her vehicle had been stolen from outside her home.
Unusually, the report describes the complainant only as an unknown female — even though police directives for stolen vehicles instruct officers to request a complainant’s license, registration, and insurance.
“The individual making the report is listed as a Jane Doe,” confirmed Cpl. Jasmine Colón-Reilly, a police spokesperson, in a statement Tuesday, using law enforcement terminology for a victim whose name is either unknown or concealed.
Property records show the Osage Avenue address listed on that report is a home owned by Capt. Nicole J. Nobles, a top deputy in the sheriff’s office who leads its warrant unit.
Responding officers wrote in the report that they later determined the missing vehicle was the same one that had been towed from the Aug. 10 crash scene.
But then the case seemed to disappear.
Though it was documented by patrol officers at the scene, a police supervisor failed to notify the department’s Crash Investigation Unit about the crash, per department protocols for thefts or collisions of vehicles under city control, police later said.
Colón-Reilly said Monday that police are “doing an internal investigation now into what happened, and why those notifications weren’t made.”
Bilal said this week she was made aware of the reported vehicle theft on Aug. 13, but did not learn until January that “no one within her chain of command had reported the incident” to fleet services, which all departments are required to do immediately if one of the city’s leased cars is stolen, crashed, or even lightly damaged.
An Inquirer reporter who visited Nobles’ home on Osage Avenue was greeted at the front door by a middle-aged man with a barking (but friendly) dog that appeared to be a beige poodle.
He said he would relay a message to Nobles. She has not responded to subsequent requests for comment.
Financial records obtained through a Right-to-Know request show that the sheriff’s office used a discretionary slush fund to cover the cost of sending Nobles to a law enforcement convention in New Orleans last summer. According to a conference listing, the event was scheduled to run from Aug. 9 to 13, a span that overlaps with the crash and subsequent theft report.
Bilal on Thursday declined to answer any questions about Nobles, why the theft was apparently reported anonymously, or whether the SUV might have been driven by someone with access to Nobles’ keys.
“We do not investigate stolen vehicles or vehicle accidents,” she said in a statement. “The Philadelphia Police Department is leading this investigation, and we kindly refer you to the PPD for any further inquiries.”
Late-model Ford vehicles are equipped with engine immobilizers, meaning that a thief would likely have had to hack the Expedition’s computer system. That can be done, for instance, through a “relay attack” in which a thief intercepts and redirects the key’s signal, or by physically breaking into the vehicle and accessing the onboard diagnostics systems.
Those and other strategies require special equipment and are typically used by professional thieves who are stealing cars as covertly as possible, experts told The Inquirer, not a person with a dog who would draw attention to himself by activating a car’s flashing lights and sirens.
“Someone with that kind of equipment, you’d be expecting them to steal multiple cars, not just going for a joyride,” said Michael Brooks, executive director of the Center for Auto Safety, a consumer advocacy group. “They’d probably be looking to take it to a chop shop or sell it.”
Philadelphia Police Major Crimes Lt. Brian Geer, who investigates stolen vehicles in the city, declined to comment on an active investigation.
In general, though, Geer said thieves rarely target modern Ford Expeditions. The city typically sees only a handful of those SUVs stolen each year.
Hondas, Nissans, and Infinitis are among the most commonly targeted for theft due to the value of the vehicles and their parts on the black market.
“I would not put Fords on the list of problematic cars with this kind of thing,” Geer said.