Rockhold recounts story of stealing back a friend’s stolen car in LA

If you’ve had a vehicle stolen, you can count on Luke Rockhold to help you get it back.

Most fighters who are forced to the sidelines will take that time to rehabilitate themselves and get better. Luke Rockhold did some of those, but he also had quite an adventurous time over the past year and a half on the sidelines.

The former UFC middleweight champion recently sat down with Submission Radio to recount a rather colorful story. It involved stealing back a friend’s stolen car in a rough neighborhood in Los Angeles.

“We went to Tulum (Mexico) and my buddy’s car got stolen out front,” Rockhold recalled.

“Tracked it to downtown Los Angeles in like the hood, and it’s very ghetto down there. The cops have been taken out of power and control, and they don’t do anything these days. And we were able to track it on the new app. It was like a brand new truck, and we tracked it to downtown and called the cops over and over again and they just kept delaying and putting us off.”

According to the 36-year-old veteran, he was forced to take action out of frustration with the lack of results from local law enforcement.

“You just hear stories about these cars that get stolen, they just keep stealing cars,” he stated. “My buddy’s a sergeant at SFPD, and he’s arrested the same guy 18 times for stealing cars. And they just keep letting him go, letting him out, stealing more cars. And they don’t do anything. You get your car stolen, and you start repeating these stories in your head of people getting their car stolen, and they just, a lot of bad things start happening with these cars.

“Over time they don’t really do anything to fix the process. It’s a shame what the system is built into. Like, the cops delayed, delayed, they didn’t own up to meeting us at the time they were going to, and we were on the phone with them for a couple of hours. We were working on it. And they missed the point, and we decided to steal back the car.”

Here’s where the story picks up.

“I walked the neighborhood and surveyed it, the whole situation, and checked the car to make sure there was no one sleeping in the back of the car,” Rockhold said. “It was already bashed in from the bumper. I was making sure there was enough room to get out, get away without someone, you know… it’s a ghetto down there. It’s ghetto as hell. We were not in a good space.”

“It was late at night, very dark, very dead, and I was dressed appropriately… for a highway robbery.”

“We did what we had to do, and we were properly prepared. I stood, you know, pulled up behind the car, stood guard, got ‘em in the car and we took off and robbed their car back.”

“It was like in a little driveway out front. It was right off the street. Some dumb carjackers. We had a spare key in it, so we were just able to pull the damn thing.”

Now that makes one wonder: how does a Ralph Lauren model “dress appropriately for a highway robbery?”

Rockhold has been out of action since July 2019, when he was knocked out by reigning champion Jan Blachowicz in the second round of his light heavyweight debut.