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South Tulsa homeowner catches mail thief on camera

Posted at 4:10 PM, Dec 08, 2016
and last updated 2016-12-08 23:01:49-05

TULSA---It's that time of year, porch pirates are out in full force. But it's not just packages on your porch they're targeting. A south Tulsa homeowner showed 2 Works for You Reporter Katie Wisely video of someone tearing through mailboxes Wednesday evening.

It's a federal crime to steal someone's mail. One victim says she caught the whole thing on camera.

Laurie Hamilton-Hobbs is about to press play to video taken from the steps of her porch.. 

"Ok here he comes," she said. "I can tell from the other videos it's a little black and white dog and he does have mail in his hand."

She has eight surveillance cameras. Six of them show a man walking his dog. Then, he appears to take mail from four different mailboxes, including Laurie's.

"He's staying there for quite awhile, ok," Hamilton-Hobbs said. "Maybe I had a lot of mail, I don't know anymore."

One of those mailboxes belongs to Brian Dausses.

"We never found any of our mail," he said. "So we found everybody else’s mail, we didn't find any of our own. We found mail all the way from people across the road to 99th and 102nd including the street behind us and that was strewn even to other streets that we were finding mail from other houses."

He says his wife went to get the mail Wednesday around 4:30 p.m. and noticed mail scattered all over the road.

"Mostly yesterday evening we were just picking up packages, well empty packages and giving them back to the neighbors that we knew whose addresses they belonged to," Dausses said. 

It only gets worse. As Hamilton-Hobbs analyzes each angle, she notices the man and his dog turn the corner and head to a connecting neighborhood. Then, she says a black SUV appears.

"See look at the mail, look at it," the homeowner said. "Yeah cause he threw some out when he was over here doing mine."

Hamilton-Hobbs returned mail to her neighbor Thursday afternoon. She hopes her gifts, belongings and even her identity don't land in the wrong hands. The hands of a man out walking his dog, caught with hidden eyes all over her house.

"It's scary that someone can take it away just like that," Hamilton-Hobbs said.

The homeowner filled out a police report online. She plans to take the video to the Tulsa Police Department so they can try and track this person down.

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