Suburban mom plays detective to find toilet paper prankster

By Mark Frauenfelder at 10:02 am Tuesday, Aug 8

There's an interesting piece in the Riverside (CA) Press-Enterprise about a woman who got her house toilet papered and decided to hunt down the culprits. She didn't want to involve the police, reasoning that they had better things to do, so she took the following steps:

* She canvassed local stores to see which one had a run on toilet paper.

* She then got the manager of the store to show her surveillance videos, allowing her to see the personalized letterman's jacket of one of the purchasers, as well as the license plate of the vehicle they got into.

* Finally, she used a high school yearbook (matched to the school based on the letterman's jacket) and online databases to get the names, phone numbers and addresses of all the teens spotted in the store tapes.

To me, this is a bit more than a "talker" feature. One takeaway, IMHO, is that we're pretty far down the road to sheepdom when average citizens start thinking "well, everything's monitored all the time anyway - let's see if I can make use of that."

Reader comments:

Garrett says:

I saw the story you posted on BB about the tp detective. I think you're being a little bit selective in what you posted there. The full story lists how it wasn't just an innocent tp incident, the woman's cars were vandalized, her lawn fixtures damaged and her lawn ruined with dog food and flour. The kids she tracked down are facing felony charges, and I know from bitter experience that means they did hundreds of dollars in real, not just tp damages. Don't you think, taking that into account, it's a bit more clear why she persued this matter with such vigor? Portraying it as just a tp'ed house makes her actions look alot more extreme.

Roger Krueger says:

Here's another busted-by-grocery-store-video story, some teens building dry-ice bombs.

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Mark Frauenfelder

My latest book, Made by Hand, now in paperback. Follow me on Twitter.