Wheelchair ramp stolen, sold for scrap | The Wichita Eagle

James Richardson was lying in bed Tuesday morning when he looked out the window and saw a stranger walking down the street with what looked like his wheelchair ramp.

"I don't move too quick," the 72-year-old Richardson said, "and by the time I got to the front door, he was gone."

So was the ramp he used to get in and out of his south Wichita home.

"It's despicable," Lt. Mike Hennessy, who heads the Wichita Police Department's larceny section, said Wednesday. "The guy's inside his house, he sees what's going on, and he can't do anything about it."

When his son returned home a short time later, Richardson told him to call 911.

"We were on it within minutes," Hennessy said.

Richardson's son called someone he knows at Wichita Iron and Metals on West Merton, one of the city's scrap yards.

Police contacted other scrap yards around town and told them to be on the lookout for a wheelchair ramp.

Within half an hour, Richardson said, Wichita Iron and Metals called his son to report someone had sold them what was likely the ramp. It had been taken apart, with the nonmetal parts discarded.

The ramp has an estimated value of $3,000, police said. The man who brought it to the scrap yard sold it for $7.20.

When he returned later in the day with more scrap metal, police were alerted. Officers arrested a 50-year-old man.

A recently passed scrap metal law was instrumental in this case, Hennessy said, because it requires scrap sellers to sign their names to transaction documents. Police had the name of the man who sold the ramp to the scrap yard, making it easier to arrest him.

The ramp was returned to Richardson, but because some parts are missing it may not function properly.

Because he served in the military, Richardson said, the Veterans Administration will replace his wheelchair ramp.

Others may not be so lucky.

If elderly residents on fixed incomes get a ramp stolen, Richardson said, "they can't replace that."

That, he said, is brutal.