Just in case you weren’t already worried about the government using surveillance to monitor you, now you have to wonder about your neighbors. To be fair, this is a story about a family that was trying to track down the people that maliciously defaced their property. Not surprising, then, that they used everything they could to find the perpetrators.
What appeared to be a common teenage prank has led to felony vandalism charges against a handful of Norco teens.
They toilet-papered the wrong house — the home of a woman unwilling to let them get away with it.
After months of investigation and suspect interviews — spurred on by homeowner Katja Base’s own investigating skills — Norco sheriff’s deputies sent the case to the Riverside County district attorney’s office to decide whether to charge the teens and one adult.
That all seems fairly straightforward, but what’s really interesting is the data they actually managed to get for their investigation:
Katja Base decided she couldn’t expect sheriff’s deputies to work around the clock on a toilet-paper investigation. Armed only with two sneaker imprints on wads of moist toilet paper, she started her sleuthing. She persuaded store managers to average daily toilet-paper purchases for the week to spot the anomalies.
Just two days before the vandals struck, Stater Bros. on Hamner Avenue had a run on bathroom tissue.
The store manager reviewed the day’s receipts to find who bought so much toilet paper.
At 7:30 p.m. Feb. 17, someone bought 144 rolls of toilet paper, cheese, dog food, flour and plastic forks — the same items that ended up on Base’s house and lawn. The cash transaction left no easy way to trace the purchaser, but Base was on a roll. She asked if the store had video surveillance.
The footage showed four teenagers making the purchase: one of them wore a Norco High School letterman’s jacket with a name stitched across the back. The store’s parking-lot surveillance camera caught the truck the kids were driving.
Norco sheriff deputies didn’t take long to figure out who was responsible.
However, when the case stalled, Base nudged it along. She borrowed a Norco High yearbook and used online databases to get the name spellings, phone numbers and addresses of the kids on the store tape.
Seems like a case of her becoming a deputy or at least a concerned-citizen and helping carry along the investigation, with the blessing of her local law enforcement agency, in the interest of justice.
