By the time we reached the sidewalk, the dot on the screen had stopped behind Sharon’s detached garage. Jordan and I crept along the fence line. Through a gap in the boards, I saw the garage door rolled halfway open. Inside, stacked from the concrete floor nearly to the rafters, were hundreds of packages. Brown boxes, padded envelopes, gift bags, all with shipping labels still attached.
Then a white cargo van backed into the alley behind her yard. A heavyset man in a ball cap jumped out and started loading boxes two at a time while Sharon checked items off a clipboard. I watched her hand him my gift box. The dot on Jordan’s phone jumped into the van. “Grandma,” Jordan whispered, “that label on top says Mrs. Alvarez. She lives three streets over.”
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’t chase it. We didn’t 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.
The driver was Sharon’s 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.
Officers came to Sharon’s 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’s 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’t laugh this time.
Over the next month, the police returned items to families all over town. Mrs. Alvarez got back her late husband’s watch, which had been sent out for repair. I got my granddaughter’s 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’m the busiest eighty-two-year-old on our street, and nobody calls cardboard boxes a small thing anymore.
