In-Law Enforcement
I'm on my annual two-week "vacation" with my in-laws, and I never expected law enforcement to be involved on day 2.
Part 1: The Heist
MIL and I left the rental together for the grocery store around 8:00 this morning. I was dubious about the wisdom of this, because it usually takes her about three times as long as me to shop, but I figured I'd just take my time and it would work out. As soon as we got in the store, we went in different directions. I managed to kill about 30 minutes by slowly wandering up and down the aisles, back and forth, and another 10 minutes checking out. I didn't have the key to the car, so I stood with my cart just inside the entrance and waited. And waited. I messaged her a few times and I used Find Friends on my iPhone to try to locate her, but the store's Wi-Fi didn't work and I couldn't get a cell signal.
I finally gave up and walked the length of the store. At the very last register, there she was, putting an impossibly huge volume of groceries on the belt. She asked me if I'd been trying to reach her and told me she'd left her phone in the car. No wonder she didn't answer my messages. Anyway, somehow she managed to buy so many groceries that once they were bagged, there was no way of getting all the bags in her cart. I ended up putting three of her bags in my cart, and we wobbled to her car.
The first thing she did at the car was look for her phone. No phone. She thought she remembered having it in the store, but she was also sure it was in the car, and her story kept changing. I had no idea what the truth was. We started the 15-minute drive back to the rental, and I messaged my husband to ask him if MIL's phone was there. A minute later, my husband sent me a screenshot from his phone. Find Friends was showing MIL's phone as being in a residential neighborhood about halfway between the store and the rental--and it was an area we hadn't been in.
Part 2: The Search
After some frantic messaging with my husband, who immediately remotely locked the phone and put a "lost" message on its screen with a number to call to report it if found, I made the command decision to re-route MIL to the apparent perpetrator's address. I didn't know what we were going to do once we got there, but I thought maybe we'd see something obvious and solve the mystery.
Nope.
I asked MIL to park in front of the house and stay in the car (with the AC going to keep the groceries from melting). I wandered around with my phone, watching my location on Find Friends versus her phone's location. By then her phone had gone offline, making me even more suspicious. But based on the previously reported locations, I was certain it was the house at 970 Redacted Street. I took pictures of the front of the house and zoomed in to get the license plates of the three cars in the driveway. Then I got back in the car. MIL wanted to knock on the door of the house and confront the people. I told her in no uncertain terms we would NOT be doing that. If the phone had been picked up accidentally, the people would see the lost message and call us to give back the phone. If the phone had been stolen, we did not want to confront the criminals.
As MIL drove back to the rental, I called the police non-emergency number to see if they would go to 970 Redacted to try to retrieve the phone. It's a small town, so there was one dispatcher working, and he answered immediately. And no matter what I said, he couldn't understand me. Couldn't get my name right, couldn't understand the name of the street, couldn't get the house number right...I was really, really glad it wasn't an actual emergency. I explained that Find Friends was showing that house as the location of the phone. The dispatcher said ok, thanks, they'd send someone over, and hung up.
I honestly thought to myself, wow, that was too easy. A minute later, my phone rang--and it was the dispatcher. He said the police officer wanted me to come to the police station to show them the maps so they could better understand the situation. MIL turned the car around and dropped me off at the police station, then headed to the rental to get our still-melting groceries in the freezer. There was nowhere to park around the police station anyway because there was a farmers' market in town.
When I walked into the police station, my dispatcher friend was sitting right there, behind a protective pane. As soon as I looked at him, he called me by name. He told the officer I was there, and a few minutes later, the officer came out and talked with me for about 5 minutes. I explained to him what had happened and showed him screenshots from earlier, plus the live view, which showed her phone offline for about 30 minutes. He said technically it was outside their jurisdiction and I should have called the state police (!), but he offered to go over there with another officer.
I sat in the lobby and waited. The house was only about three minutes away, so it didn't take long. The officer returned and told me they didn't have the phone. He said the people at 970 were four generations of a family, all together for the long holiday weekend, and he was pretty sure from talking with them that they didn't have the phone. None of them had left the house yet that morning. The family even woke up the great-grandson to make sure he hadn't left. The officer also checked with the people next door to 970 (the houses were very close) and he had no luck there either.
At that point, there wasn't anything else the officer could do. The phone was offline and the last address didn't check out. The officer thought maybe someone was driving by the house with the phone and shut it off right then. The dispatcher thought the phone was still at the grocery store, several miles away, and the location was bogus. We thought they were both wrong. We knew the phone was online at that location for at least 10 minutes, so it wasn't someone driving by. But with the phone offline, there was nothing else we could do. The officer said if the phone came online again and we had a location pinpointed, to call back. I thanked the officer and messaged my husband to send someone to pick me up.
Part 3: The Chase
Right after I stepped outside to wait, I re-checked Find Friends...and MIL's phone was online again! But the location wasn't precise. It was showing the same block, but it was jumping from one house to another. I wondered if a dog had stolen the phone and was running through backyards with his treasure. Anyway, I couldn't very well call the police back and say, well, the phone's online again, but it could be any of these ten houses.
As I rode back to the rental, I kept checking the location and messaging with my husband. We were perplexed as to what was going on. We were sure it was one of the houses on that block, but we didn't know which one. All we could do was wait and keep checking Find Friends. While we waited, we tried to figure out what to do. My FB friends provided good info and advice on options. My husband and FIL were going to take a bike ride anyway, so they decided they'd ride to Redacted Street and call and ping the phone, hoping to hear it. Sending a ping would cause the phone to make a sonar ping-like noise. Calling it would cause the ringtone to play. In a rare stroke of luck, my husband had recently set MIL's ringtone to...a quacking duck. And MIL had her ringtone on maximum volume.
I stayed at the rental and kept refreshing Find Friends and talking with friends on social media. I was eagerly awaiting to hear news of quacking coming from a screened-in porch on Redacted Street. I watched our sleuths' progress on Find Friends as they got closer and closer to the phone. By then, the location of the phone was being reported consistently as 986 Redacted. The first report I got from the scene just about killed me--my husband thought he heard quacking. There was a pond nearby, so I wondered if it was a real duck or a fake duck, but no more quacks were heard. My husband switched to pings, and sometimes he thought he heard faint pings in the distance, but he wasn't close enough to the source to be sure. This went on for almost 30 minutes, with no positive confirmation of where the phone was.
Since the phone was online again and a single consistent location was being reported again, my husband called the police non-emergency number to give them an update. The officers said they'd respond to the new address, and they were there in just a few minutes. Maybe five minutes later, I got a message from my husband with a picture of an insulated grocery bag, asking if it belonged to MIL. MIL looked at it and she thought it was hers. By the time I was about to reply, I got another message from my husband saying they had the phone, and it was in a judge's car! We'd have to wait for their return to get the details. In the meantime, MIL was furious about the judge stealing her phone AND her grocery bag, and she wanted to press charges.
Part 4: The Reconstruction
When the guys finally got back, we heard the rest of the story. The police officers had been reluctant to knock on the door at 986 Redacted because they knew a judge lived there, and why would a judge steal a cell phone? My husband was pinging it a bunch but wasn't about to go on the property. As the police officers walked to the front door of the house, they went past the judge's car, and they heard faint pings. The judge walked out before the officers knocked; he'd been watching the shenanigans in front of his house. The judge asked right away if this was about the grocery bag. Grocery bag? He came out, unlocked his car, and opened the trunk to get the bag. As John pinged MIL's phone, loud sonar pings could be heard from the open trunk.
So...what the hell happened? Here's our best guess at a reconstruction of the events.
MIL and I took reusable grocery bags into the store. I put mine in the little area of the cart closest to the handle. MIL had three large insulated bags, and she put hers under the basket in the area where you'd usually put large items. Unbeknownst to her, she had thrown her cell phone and the rental key in one of the insulated bags before she put the bag under the cart. She must have thought the bag was her purse, although why she'd have the rental key in her hand 15 minutes after we left the rental will forever remain a mystery.
She went to the produce department first, and as she walked around, the bag with the phone and key slid off her cart. She didn't notice the bag on the floor and walked away. At some point, someone picked the bag off the floor and sat it on top of a pile of produce. Later, a certain judge saw the bag, picked it up, and took it to the store's lost and found before he left. He thought the bag was empty, so he asked if anyone had lost a bag, and since no one had reported one lost, he kept it. He left the grocery store before we did (since MIL shopped for over an hour), and by the time we left, he was already home. He didn't use the grocery bag, so it was still in the trunk of his car, and the phone and keys were still inside.
Because the phone was inside the trunk of a car, its cell network access was very weak, so it kept going online and offline, and the error of margin for the GPS was large. That's why it looked like it was at other addresses sometimes. The judge didn't hear the quacking or pinging because his car was parked in front of his house, and by the time we started trying to find the phone, he was at the back of the house.
Part 5: The Mystery
This all made sense and fit together well, except...when I Googled for the owner of the house at that address and confirmed it was the name of the judge John had heard from the officers, I found out the judge wasn't a judge after all. In fact, I couldn't find anything on Google about him ever having been a judge. What I did find was far more interesting. He had been a local municipal administrator until about five months ago, when he resigned from his job after allocations of embezzlement from the local town!
This raised all sorts of questions. Did he think the police were there because of investigation of the embezzlement? Why did the police refer to him as a judge? Did he know the phone was in the bag all along and stole it this way to make it look like an innocent mistake? I still think it was probably an accident, but I'm slightly suspicious. We will never know. But MIL got back her phone, her key, and most importantly, her insulated grocery bag, so all is well again.
Part 1: The Heist
MIL and I left the rental together for the grocery store around 8:00 this morning. I was dubious about the wisdom of this, because it usually takes her about three times as long as me to shop, but I figured I'd just take my time and it would work out. As soon as we got in the store, we went in different directions. I managed to kill about 30 minutes by slowly wandering up and down the aisles, back and forth, and another 10 minutes checking out. I didn't have the key to the car, so I stood with my cart just inside the entrance and waited. And waited. I messaged her a few times and I used Find Friends on my iPhone to try to locate her, but the store's Wi-Fi didn't work and I couldn't get a cell signal.
I finally gave up and walked the length of the store. At the very last register, there she was, putting an impossibly huge volume of groceries on the belt. She asked me if I'd been trying to reach her and told me she'd left her phone in the car. No wonder she didn't answer my messages. Anyway, somehow she managed to buy so many groceries that once they were bagged, there was no way of getting all the bags in her cart. I ended up putting three of her bags in my cart, and we wobbled to her car.
The first thing she did at the car was look for her phone. No phone. She thought she remembered having it in the store, but she was also sure it was in the car, and her story kept changing. I had no idea what the truth was. We started the 15-minute drive back to the rental, and I messaged my husband to ask him if MIL's phone was there. A minute later, my husband sent me a screenshot from his phone. Find Friends was showing MIL's phone as being in a residential neighborhood about halfway between the store and the rental--and it was an area we hadn't been in.
Part 2: The Search
After some frantic messaging with my husband, who immediately remotely locked the phone and put a "lost" message on its screen with a number to call to report it if found, I made the command decision to re-route MIL to the apparent perpetrator's address. I didn't know what we were going to do once we got there, but I thought maybe we'd see something obvious and solve the mystery.
Nope.
I asked MIL to park in front of the house and stay in the car (with the AC going to keep the groceries from melting). I wandered around with my phone, watching my location on Find Friends versus her phone's location. By then her phone had gone offline, making me even more suspicious. But based on the previously reported locations, I was certain it was the house at 970 Redacted Street. I took pictures of the front of the house and zoomed in to get the license plates of the three cars in the driveway. Then I got back in the car. MIL wanted to knock on the door of the house and confront the people. I told her in no uncertain terms we would NOT be doing that. If the phone had been picked up accidentally, the people would see the lost message and call us to give back the phone. If the phone had been stolen, we did not want to confront the criminals.
As MIL drove back to the rental, I called the police non-emergency number to see if they would go to 970 Redacted to try to retrieve the phone. It's a small town, so there was one dispatcher working, and he answered immediately. And no matter what I said, he couldn't understand me. Couldn't get my name right, couldn't understand the name of the street, couldn't get the house number right...I was really, really glad it wasn't an actual emergency. I explained that Find Friends was showing that house as the location of the phone. The dispatcher said ok, thanks, they'd send someone over, and hung up.
I honestly thought to myself, wow, that was too easy. A minute later, my phone rang--and it was the dispatcher. He said the police officer wanted me to come to the police station to show them the maps so they could better understand the situation. MIL turned the car around and dropped me off at the police station, then headed to the rental to get our still-melting groceries in the freezer. There was nowhere to park around the police station anyway because there was a farmers' market in town.
When I walked into the police station, my dispatcher friend was sitting right there, behind a protective pane. As soon as I looked at him, he called me by name. He told the officer I was there, and a few minutes later, the officer came out and talked with me for about 5 minutes. I explained to him what had happened and showed him screenshots from earlier, plus the live view, which showed her phone offline for about 30 minutes. He said technically it was outside their jurisdiction and I should have called the state police (!), but he offered to go over there with another officer.
I sat in the lobby and waited. The house was only about three minutes away, so it didn't take long. The officer returned and told me they didn't have the phone. He said the people at 970 were four generations of a family, all together for the long holiday weekend, and he was pretty sure from talking with them that they didn't have the phone. None of them had left the house yet that morning. The family even woke up the great-grandson to make sure he hadn't left. The officer also checked with the people next door to 970 (the houses were very close) and he had no luck there either.
At that point, there wasn't anything else the officer could do. The phone was offline and the last address didn't check out. The officer thought maybe someone was driving by the house with the phone and shut it off right then. The dispatcher thought the phone was still at the grocery store, several miles away, and the location was bogus. We thought they were both wrong. We knew the phone was online at that location for at least 10 minutes, so it wasn't someone driving by. But with the phone offline, there was nothing else we could do. The officer said if the phone came online again and we had a location pinpointed, to call back. I thanked the officer and messaged my husband to send someone to pick me up.
Part 3: The Chase
Right after I stepped outside to wait, I re-checked Find Friends...and MIL's phone was online again! But the location wasn't precise. It was showing the same block, but it was jumping from one house to another. I wondered if a dog had stolen the phone and was running through backyards with his treasure. Anyway, I couldn't very well call the police back and say, well, the phone's online again, but it could be any of these ten houses.
As I rode back to the rental, I kept checking the location and messaging with my husband. We were perplexed as to what was going on. We were sure it was one of the houses on that block, but we didn't know which one. All we could do was wait and keep checking Find Friends. While we waited, we tried to figure out what to do. My FB friends provided good info and advice on options. My husband and FIL were going to take a bike ride anyway, so they decided they'd ride to Redacted Street and call and ping the phone, hoping to hear it. Sending a ping would cause the phone to make a sonar ping-like noise. Calling it would cause the ringtone to play. In a rare stroke of luck, my husband had recently set MIL's ringtone to...a quacking duck. And MIL had her ringtone on maximum volume.
I stayed at the rental and kept refreshing Find Friends and talking with friends on social media. I was eagerly awaiting to hear news of quacking coming from a screened-in porch on Redacted Street. I watched our sleuths' progress on Find Friends as they got closer and closer to the phone. By then, the location of the phone was being reported consistently as 986 Redacted. The first report I got from the scene just about killed me--my husband thought he heard quacking. There was a pond nearby, so I wondered if it was a real duck or a fake duck, but no more quacks were heard. My husband switched to pings, and sometimes he thought he heard faint pings in the distance, but he wasn't close enough to the source to be sure. This went on for almost 30 minutes, with no positive confirmation of where the phone was.
Since the phone was online again and a single consistent location was being reported again, my husband called the police non-emergency number to give them an update. The officers said they'd respond to the new address, and they were there in just a few minutes. Maybe five minutes later, I got a message from my husband with a picture of an insulated grocery bag, asking if it belonged to MIL. MIL looked at it and she thought it was hers. By the time I was about to reply, I got another message from my husband saying they had the phone, and it was in a judge's car! We'd have to wait for their return to get the details. In the meantime, MIL was furious about the judge stealing her phone AND her grocery bag, and she wanted to press charges.
Part 4: The Reconstruction
When the guys finally got back, we heard the rest of the story. The police officers had been reluctant to knock on the door at 986 Redacted because they knew a judge lived there, and why would a judge steal a cell phone? My husband was pinging it a bunch but wasn't about to go on the property. As the police officers walked to the front door of the house, they went past the judge's car, and they heard faint pings. The judge walked out before the officers knocked; he'd been watching the shenanigans in front of his house. The judge asked right away if this was about the grocery bag. Grocery bag? He came out, unlocked his car, and opened the trunk to get the bag. As John pinged MIL's phone, loud sonar pings could be heard from the open trunk.
So...what the hell happened? Here's our best guess at a reconstruction of the events.
MIL and I took reusable grocery bags into the store. I put mine in the little area of the cart closest to the handle. MIL had three large insulated bags, and she put hers under the basket in the area where you'd usually put large items. Unbeknownst to her, she had thrown her cell phone and the rental key in one of the insulated bags before she put the bag under the cart. She must have thought the bag was her purse, although why she'd have the rental key in her hand 15 minutes after we left the rental will forever remain a mystery.
She went to the produce department first, and as she walked around, the bag with the phone and key slid off her cart. She didn't notice the bag on the floor and walked away. At some point, someone picked the bag off the floor and sat it on top of a pile of produce. Later, a certain judge saw the bag, picked it up, and took it to the store's lost and found before he left. He thought the bag was empty, so he asked if anyone had lost a bag, and since no one had reported one lost, he kept it. He left the grocery store before we did (since MIL shopped for over an hour), and by the time we left, he was already home. He didn't use the grocery bag, so it was still in the trunk of his car, and the phone and keys were still inside.
Because the phone was inside the trunk of a car, its cell network access was very weak, so it kept going online and offline, and the error of margin for the GPS was large. That's why it looked like it was at other addresses sometimes. The judge didn't hear the quacking or pinging because his car was parked in front of his house, and by the time we started trying to find the phone, he was at the back of the house.
Part 5: The Mystery
This all made sense and fit together well, except...when I Googled for the owner of the house at that address and confirmed it was the name of the judge John had heard from the officers, I found out the judge wasn't a judge after all. In fact, I couldn't find anything on Google about him ever having been a judge. What I did find was far more interesting. He had been a local municipal administrator until about five months ago, when he resigned from his job after allocations of embezzlement from the local town!
This raised all sorts of questions. Did he think the police were there because of investigation of the embezzlement? Why did the police refer to him as a judge? Did he know the phone was in the bag all along and stole it this way to make it look like an innocent mistake? I still think it was probably an accident, but I'm slightly suspicious. We will never know. But MIL got back her phone, her key, and most importantly, her insulated grocery bag, so all is well again.
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