PANAMA CITY BEACH — Ambulance 18, which was stolen from an EMS station on Panama City Beach around 11 p.m. Friday, was found abandoned and intact in Panama City around 5 p.m. Saturday.
The ambulance was parked at the EMS station on Hutchison Boulevard about 11 p.m. Friday. Paramedics had stopped to resupply the vehicle, but while they were away it disappeared, said EMS Division Chief Corky Young. They discovered the theft when they went outside to respond to another emergency and the vehicle was missing.
The crew assigned to number 18 got back to work in a different ambulance, Young said, so “there was no service interruption.”
Dozens of local law enforcement officers searched “every nook and cranny” of the beach overnight and turned up nothing. The vehicle is equipped with a GPS tracking device, but the on-board computer needs to be on to activate the GPS. Young said whoever took it didn’t turn on the computer. That the ambulance had not been located by Saturday afternoon had Young perplexed.
“I expected this thing to be found about a half-hour after sunrise,” he said.
Instead it was recovered after a resident phoned in a tip about a half-hour before sunset, abandoned in the area of Seventh Street and Grace Avenue, said Bay County spokeswoman Valerie Sale. Criminal investigators were processing the scene, but nothing was stolen, not even a paramedic’s purse, which was in the ambulance when it was taken, Sale said.
“All of the equipment and medications were intact,” she said.
The ambulance is an older model with an estimated total value of about $50,000, Sale said, but the cost to replace it would’ve been closer to $250,000.
The Bay County Sheriff’s Office is investigating.