WISE COUNTY (1080 KRLD) - Imagine you run a used car lot, and you notice that all of your inventory was stolen.
That's what happened over the weekend in Wise County.
"They had six vehicles stolen, and two of the buildings were burglarized," says Lt. Chad Lanier of the Wise County Sheriff's Office. "They took a safe (and) all the company stuff out of the building and stored them in one of the vehicles that we recovered."
Lt. Lanier was driving along Highway 380 towards Bridgeport when he noticed three cars parked in front of a locked gate near Big Sandy Creek.
Lanier checked out the scene and discovered that the three cars were among the six stolen from the used car lot.
Lanier also found the two suspects, boyfriend-and-girlfriend Justin Wehrenberg and Delories Barnett, both of Weatherford.
"Honestly, I wasn't expecting for the bad guys to be there, but they were," Lt. Lanier says. "I kind of caught them off guard and got a hold of them before they could run off."
Lanier says Wehrenberg and Barnett each have lengthy criminal histories.
"Both of these are lifetime criminals," Lanier says. "I believe the male is still on parole, and the female is waiting to go to court (and) go to prison out of other cases where she did burglaries here in Wise County."
Lanier says apparently, the two were stashing the cars in different locations in the course of moving them to a central location.
"I just happened to get lucky and catch them while they were preparing to start moving other vehicles," Lanier says.
All of the stolen cars were recovered, as were all the other stolen items.
"Everything that they took out of the business that was worth value was left inside one of the vehicles that they had stolen," Lt. Lanier says.
Lanier says Barnett also threw a bag of meth right in front of him, so she's also facing meth possession charges.
Both Barnett and Wehrenberg remain behind bars in the Wise County Jail.
