Jordan called 911 while I kept my eyes on that van. He held my arm the whole time. When it pulled out of the alley, we didn\u2019t chase it. We didn\u2019t need to. The tracker did the work. My heart was pounding, but my voice stayed steady. I read the moving location to the dispatcher street by street, and twelve minutes later, two patrol cars pulled the van over outside a self-storage facility near the highway.<\/p>\n
The driver was Sharon\u2019s nephew. Inside the storage unit, police found nearly six hundred stolen packages from four neighborhoods. Sharon had been taking deliveries for over a year, and her nephew resold the contents online. She only ever returned packages after someone complained, to make the mistakes look innocent. With older neighbors, she assumed nobody would check a camera, or that no one would believe us. The detective said our tracker gave them the break they had been waiting for.<\/p>\n
Officers came to Sharon\u2019s door that same evening. She tried telling them the packages had all been delivered to her by accident. The detective simply held up my doorbell footage and the tracker\u2019s location history. Sharon and her nephew were both charged with mail theft and receiving stolen property. A few neighbors came out onto their porches to watch. When they led her past my porch in handcuffs, she didn\u2019t laugh this time.<\/p>\n
Over the next month, the police returned items to families all over town. Mrs. Alvarez got back her late husband\u2019s watch, which had been sent out for repair. I got my granddaughter\u2019s birthday gift, a little late but still wrapped. The neighborhood association started a package watch program and asked me to run it. These days, I\u2019m the busiest eighty-two-year-old on our street, and nobody calls cardboard boxes a small thing anymore.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Jordan called 911 while I kept my eyes on that van. He held my arm the whole time. When it pulled out of the alley, we didn\u2019t… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7832","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-stories"],"yoast_head":"\n