The owner of a stolen ambulance is glad the vehicle wasn't damaged during a joyride around the streets of Timaru.
Dash-cam footage showed a man approaching the private ambulance early on Tuesday morning.
Don Gutsell, paramedic and owner of ProMed, said the man drove the vehicle through thick fog, ran through a stop sign and reached speeds up to 82km/h before he abandoned it near Timaru's port - all in the span of around five minutes.
The ambulance was left on and unlocked outside Timaru Hospital around 12:30am Tuesday, as Gutsell was inside preparing a patient to be transferred to Christchurch.
"We were in the hospital for about 20 minutes. I loaded the patient up, went to come out, and the ambulance was gone," he said.
"My heart sank and I thought to myself 'perhaps I've left the handbrake off and its rolled away'.
"Because it was a foggy, cold night, we often leave the vehicle running and shut the doors and get the heater going full bore so that when they come out of the emergency department, they've got a very short space of time in the cold air and its back to being warm for them."
Gutsell said he searched nearby streets to find the missing ambulance, but to no avail.
He then called his wife, who tracked it down via Gutsell's phone which had been left inside.
He arrived at the ambulance about the same time police arrived, he said.
Nothing was taken and items like the med-kit were still intact and untouched, Gutsell said.
"It was just parked up, lights were still on, motor wasn't running. This guy had just taken this thing for a joyride," he said.
Police officers were called to Queen Street shortly before 1am on Tuesday, after a report of a vehicle being stolen.
The vehicle was located abandoned about 20 minutes later and was returned to the owner, a police spokesperson said.
A 25-year-old man was due to appear in the Timaru District Court on Wednesday charged with unlawfully taking a motor vehicle and driving without a licence, police said.
Gutsell said as a result of the theft, his patient was delayed in getting to Christchurch Hospital by around 90 minutes.
"That's the sad thing. When someone needs to go to Christchurch at that time of the night, its not always life and death, but its for the betterment of the patient," he said.
"For that person, essentially, they had to suffer for an extra hour and a half waiting for the ambulance."
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