This past Thursday, I was working on a house in my neighborhood, prepping it for a paint job. The house is on a corner lot. I was working on the side of the house that faces the side street. My truck was parked on the swale, about 15 feet away from where I was working. At around 5 p.m. I heard a car door slam. I look out to the street, and there was a car pulling away that was on the other side of my truck. Something did not feel right. I have a topper on my truck, and the back window was open and the tailgate was down. I ran over to the bed to see if anything was missing. My phone was my biggest concern but I was not sure if I had locked it in the cab or if I hid it under some rags with my keys. My keys were still there. Why would somebody steal my phone and not my keys? I could still see the car driving away and I was torn between jumping in my truck and chasing the car, or looking for my phone first. Because I misplace my phone so often, I decided to look for it. After about 30 seconds I could not find it and jumped in my truck and try to find the car. It was gone. No tag. No make or model. I think it was silver. I was already beating myself up for not having jumped in my truck and follow the car. I flew back to my job and asked a neighbor to call the sheriff. A friend of mine lives across the street from where this happened. He had cameras on his house and got the whole thing on video. But no tag number. The guy stole a bag of hand tools, a sander that I had just bought that day, and my phone. The video shows him driving by one way first, casing out my truck, then coming back the other way. He stops in the middle of the road right beside my truck, gets out and while standing on the driver side of my truck so that he has blocked from my view he reaches his arm into my bed and starts feeling around for stuff to steal. That is the only reason he got my phone, because it was buried under some rags. And that is why he missed my keys, because he was reaching blindly. He did all of this while I was 20 feet away with my back to him. In broad daylight.
My phone. Let me try to put into context the magnitude of the loss of my phone being stolen. Of course, it would be devastating for anybody to lose their cell phone. It is so much more than just a phone anymore. My phone had over 5,000 photos and videos on it. The vast majority of the photos and videos are of a single little girl. This little girl,Violet, came into my life when she was just 6 months old, and anybody who knows me personally, knows this little girl is the most important thing in the world to me. We have an incredible, incredible relationship. The loss was absolutely devastating. I felt like a part of her had been kidnapped.
After law enforcement did their thing, I ran home and took a shower, and then went and got a new phone. I had anxiety so bad I could not go home. I kept driving around looking for the car. My friend sent me a still shot of the car to my new phone. I drove around for about 10 hours in my area going up and down the same streets over and over, and through all the parking lots of any apartment buildings. The car was an older Camry that appeared to be silver-blue with both front hub caps missing and the turn signal lens on the right side was broken. It should stand out right? Wrong. I started seeing older camrys, and they all seem to have front hub caps missing. By the time it starting getting light out, I was exhausted so I went home to get a little sleep. After about 2 hours, I downed an espresso and hit the road again. I figured that if there was any chance for me to get this phone back it was going to be within the first 24 hours. If I could find the car, the guy might still have the phone with him. Beyond that, it would probably be futile. I was on a mission. I knew I was going to find the car, because I would never ever stop looking for it. I just needed to find it before the guy got rid of my phone. I was already planning how I was going to destroy this guys life if I did not get my photos back. I spent the whole day Friday in my neighborhood driving around and staking out intersections, looking for that car. I also knocked on every door that had a camera on the house trying to get a better shot of the car with a tag number. You guys would not believe how many older camrys or on the road that have front hub caps missing. They are everywhere. After this, I will be seeing them for the rest of my life. By early Friday evening I had still not seeing the car. Violet came to visit me this weekend, so I had to put off my search for a little bit. She was the only thing that could take my mind off of this nightmare. On Saturday morning I got a chance to go out for about an hour and look. I came across and older Camry that looked just like the one in the video except it might have been a little lighter in color. I know how monitors and digital cameras can mislead regarding the color of an object so I thought this could possibly be the car. As I was following it, I see the deputies who took the report driving towards me. I flag them, and ask them if they can pull over the car in front of me to see if it might be the guy. They said the car was too light and they said that they cannot just pull over anybody like that without probable cause. Frustrated, I continue to follow the car until it pulled up to a house. The guy got out and did not match the description of the guy in the video. This was not the car. Discouraged and starting to lose hope, I went back to my house to hang out with Violet for a while. She was going to a party with her aunt in the early afternoon and that would give me more time to go out and search. After Violet left, I got in my truck and drove down to the end of my street. Lo and behold there's an older Camry with front hub caps missing, in the parking lot of the neighborhood park. A guy gets out of the car and looks like he could be the guy in the video. When I had watched the video, I really did not focus on what the guy looked like because the car was the thing I was looking for.. I just knew he was black and had a buckwheat haircut. This guy was black and had a buckwheat haircut. The car looked identical except for the color. This one was pure silver and the one in the video looked like it had blue in it. I drove down to the corner of the park and pulled over. I saw that he had noticed my truck. I was about 200 feet away from him. I sat there and watched him for about 10 minutes, and took some pictures. It looked like he was getting ready to leave, so I turned around and started heading towards him. He pulled out of the park and headed towards me. Our paths crossed and I whipped my truck around to follow him. He stopped his car in the middle of the road and got out and asked me what I was doing. I got out of my truck it said, I got robbed yesterday and your car looks like the car in the video and you look like the guy in the video. He walks up to me and starts to explain why it is not him. I play along with him, and told him I believed him. I told him I did not want to press charges and I did not even want my tools back, I just wanted my phone, and I would pay $500 to get it back, no questions asked. He said he knows everything that goes on in the neighborhood, and he knows the guy who buys all of that stuff like that that comes up. I gave him my phone number, shook his hand and thanked him for helping me. I told him to call me if he saw the car or found my phone. He fell right into my trap. About an hour later he calls me saying he has two phones. We set up to meet at a gas station. I had deputies go ahead of me and detain him. I showed up and the deputies handed me two phones and asked me if one was mine. One looked like mine. I turned it on and all of a sudden there was the image of little Violet sitting in the spare tire in the back of my truck. I got my phone back. I could not believe it. The guy was charged with dealing in stolen property, a second-degree felony that carries 15 years in prison. If the guy did not get out of his car and confront me, I would have never gotten my phone back. It turns out he had a stolen tag on his car, and the number would have done me no good anyway. This worked out the only way it could have worked out. I am not out of the woods yet though. He did a factory reset on my phone and deleted most of the photos. But from what I have heard and read, it is possible and likely that I am going to get my photos back. I have an Android and a Google account and a portion of my stuff was saved in the cloud, but most of it was gone. Lesson learned.
Now when people ask me what is the best thing I ever found, I'm going to say a late 90s Toyota Camry with front hub caps missing.