Scavenger hunt behind pilfered parcel: thief
Package returned under cover of darkness
LANGLEY — Less than 24 hours after a Langley woman shared a video to Facebook of a thief stealing a parcel off her front porch in the middle of the day, Courtney Thomas’s UPS delivery was returned to her in the middle of the night.
In the video, a woman dressed in dark clothing and carrying a smartphone approaches the house, picks up the parcel offcamera, throws it in the truck’s backseat and enters a blue Chevy Tahoe via the passenger-side door.
There was no video of the woman’s return visit, due to an overnight power outage in the area, Thomas said. But there was a note.
“Hello — let me explain myself and my action,” the note began. “Okay so there you have your package returned original packaging unopened [sic]. I did not steal it. In fact it was all apart of some stupid scavenger Halloween thing.”
“Anyway the point is it wasn’t mine and it never shoulda happened — yet it really did — that being said my apologies to your residence or [sic] any inconveniences this might have caused, truly,” the note continued. “Enjoy the day. Thanks and again truly this was a game not theft.”
Thomas discovered the package late Thursday morning, along with the note, which she shared to Facebook. Reached by phone, she said she was baffled by the whole thing.
“I’m dumbfounded, really,” said Thomas. “She snuck into my yard in the middle of the night when there was a power outage, and returned the package.”
As for the scavenger-hunt explanation, Thomas isn’t convinced.
“If it’s a weird scavenger hunt, it’s still against the law,” Thomas said. “I was not part of the game. … Something of mine was taken without permission; that’s pretty clear-cut theft.”
Thomas credited the speedy return partly to the power of social media, but mostly to her motion-detecting camera, which caught the thief in the act.
“It works,” she said of the gadget. “I got my package back in less than 24 hours.”