A Cuban resident in Houston, identified on TikTok as Amanda (@amandyta_), posted a video showing how thieves stole all four tires from her car and broke the passenger side window overnight, leaving the vehicle elevated on bricks.
"You know what it's like to wake up in the morning and find your car like this. They stole all four tires and broke the passenger window to see what they could take," Amanda recounted in the video posted last Thursday.
Fortunately, Amanda did not keep any items inside the vehicle, so the thieves did not take anything else. They even left the insurance letter on the seat.
One of the most unsettling details of the account was how closely the incident could have affected her husband. "The saddest part of this is that if my husband had left half an hour or an hour earlier, God knows what might have happened to him," she said.
The theft was not an isolated incident. In the same condominium, another Toyota suffered exactly the same procedure: passenger window broken and four tires stolen. The garbage truck driver who passed through the area shortly after informed Amanda that this was the fifth condominium in the area where he had seen the same thing that morning, and that the thieves were specifically targeting Toyota and another brand that she could not recall.
When Amanda called the police, the response was discouraging: "The police, when we called them, said they weren't going to come, that it was all over the phone." The Houston Police Department handles vehicle parts thefts as non-urgent incidents and directs reports to their phone unit, without sending patrols to the scene.
This type of theft repeatedly affects the Cuban community in Houston. In December 2024, another Cuban in Houston reported the theft of all four wheels from his Toyota on social media. Months later, on Christmas Eve of 2025, Leyanet Naranjo experienced a similar situation, and her report on TikTok sparked extensive discussion about insecurity. In March 2025, Cuban comedian Javier Berridy also reported a similar case in Miami, with a friend's car left on blocks.
Toyota vehicles are particularly vulnerable in Houston due to the interchangeability of their wheels with other brands on the black market. According to a ranking of cities with the highest wheel thefts in 2025, Houston tops the list nationally. In documented cases, organized gangs can complete the theft in just 15 minutes.
In December 2024, a gang of three Cubans based in Houston was accused of stealing 52 cars at airports in Texas and other states, with losses exceeding 4.9 million dollars.
Amanda closed her video with a direct message to her community: "I'm saying this so that you don't leave anything inside your cars, to set up the cameras, activate them, take all the measures so that this doesn't happen to you. It's very sad that you sacrifice so much just for someone to come and mess with you like this."
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