OMAHA, Nebraska (WOWT) – A “porch pirate” traveling door-to-door targeted a northwest Omaha area, but one theft victim is doing more than just filing a police report.
It’s not Santa, but a delivery driver that dropped gifts on Karen Dueling’s porch; but before she got them under a tree, a thief snatched the packages.
“We work hard for our money, you know, and its Christmas, so shame on him,” Dueling joked.
The two gifts stolen from Dueling’s porch included a globe and a blanket with family names as a special gift for her 94-year-old mother, which a thief would probably not want.
“It’s going to end up in a dumpster, and my globe somebody is going to get for Christmas, and I hope everybody who sees this, if you get a globe for Christmas, it was off my porch,” Dueling told me.
Dueling spent approximately $400 on the goods taken from her porch.
Even with a life-sized Santa watching over the gift, a porch pirate Grinch broke in and took them, but there’s a Christmas surprise: Dueling caught the thief on tape.
A neighbor up the street caught the porch pirate on a Ring camera swiping Christmas gifts.
The film depicts an intentional and uncaring robber spreading the wrong type of Christmas cheer.
“It’s the brazenness of it,” neighbor Tim Lenon explained. “If you watch him on the video, the guy actually smirks when he picks up the packages and just walks away with it.”
However, he will not get away with it.
Lenon plans to obtain camera footage from the suspect’s area while driving a white Durango.
“So, we got the first pictures of his vehicle, then I realized by looking at some of the timing it looked like he was directly following the postal truck,” said to Lenon.
Lenon and two neighbors had packages stolen at about the same time, so he’s posted video of the theft, and screen grabs of the suspect’s vehicle on various social media sites.
“If I don’t do it, and the people don’t do it, the police don’t have the resources to completely do it, so I just wanted to put everything together,” Lenon told the audience.
Back down the street at Dueling’s house, the theft of her mother’s special gift didn’t throw a wet blanket on the holidays.
“The company that made this after it was stolen completely made a brand new one for free for us to replace it,” Dueling told me.
A porch pirate can steal packages, but not the Christmas spirit in the Sunny Slope neighborhood.
The thefts caught on camera in the area happened last Wednesday, at about three in the afternoon.
Lenon has posted video of the porch pirate and the vehicle on Facebook, Reddit, and Nextdoor.
Any tips that come in, he’ll pass on to the Omaha Police.