ACTION GRAN! She leaves husband in the car and tackles thief (after tracking him down with phone app)
AS a 58-year-old grandmother, Mandy Smith may have seemed an easy target for an opportunistic burglar.
But within 90 minutes of reporting the theft to police, the hotelier tracked the intruder down, recovered the stolen items and was back cooking breakfast for her customers as usual.
Sneaking in through an unsecured door in a pre-dawn raid, the burglar had made off with her photographer husband’s £1,000 camera and a mobile phone.
After pinpointing the handset using a find-your-phone app, Mrs Smith and husband Doug, 58, rushed to the location.
While police began house-to-house inquiries, she spotted the intruder – whom she had earlier disturbed at the hotel – sprinted after him and confronted him before shoving him against a wall.
After retrieving the stolen goods, she left the man in the hands of the police.
‘I just thought, “What right does he have to break in and steal our stuff?”’ she said yesterday. ‘It was only later that it sank in what I’d done … I could have been hurt.’
The grandmother of three came down-
stairs at the £60-a-night family-run Canasta Hotel in Blackpool early on Tuesday and realised someone was hiding there. The burglar then fled through the garden. After her husband called police at around .20am, they used a computer to log into their Google ‘find my phone’ app, which tracked the device to half a mile away.
Mr Smith said: ‘We parked outside the house where the phone was and Mandy shouted, “I’m going in!”’ Mrs Smith spotted the burglar and ran after him. She said: ‘When I was sure it was him I grabbed his arms and pushed him against the wall. He wasn’t getting away from me again.’
Calling his wife as a ‘hero’, Mr Smith said: ‘She does surprise me from time to time but when she shouted, “I’m going in”, it was like a movie. She was back cooking breakfast at 8.45am.’ His wife added: ‘It was quite an exciting morning.’
A 43-year-old local man was charged with burglary and later appeared before magistrates in the town.