I’m far from a perfect grandson. But never have I ever stolen my grandmother’s car. Or lit it on fire. One Miami man did both. Thanksgiving dinner’s going to be awkward this year.

Police respond to a suspicious crash

Around 2:30 a.m. on a Wednesday morning, someone called the police to report a vehicle crash in Miami Township. They added that they saw a young man fleeing the scene on foot. They even described him in detail: 25 years old, 6 feet tall, and wearing a white T-shirt and jeans.

When police arrived at the intersection of State Route 450 and U.S. 50, they indeed found a vehicle at the bottom of an embankment. And things got weirder. It had “significant burn marks” in two places: the driver’s seat and the fuel-filling door. It looked like someone had clumsily attempted to light the vehicle on fire.

Suspect is the victim’s grandson

When officials ran the plates, they found the vehicle wasn’t registered to a young man—it was registered to an older woman. So they called her. That’s when she said her grandson, Robert Basye, had stolen her car earlier that night.

Basye never made it home. Police picked him up in the area near the crash. He matched the description of the man who’d fled the scene. He confessed to crashing the vehicle, setting it on fire, and driving while impaired.