The Stroller

OK, this just might be my first official bleg, so please, if you have a few minutes, read through this post & offer any thoughts you have on the subject (either in the comments section here or on my or Mindy’s Facebook pages, as I assume we’ll both link to this there).

Saturday. Memorial Day weekend. Mindy & I are relaxing after hosting a post-5K brunch at our house. Edwin wakes from his nap around 3, & we’re bored. We have more events with friends & family planned for Sunday & Monday, so we figure this would be as good as any time to get a few things checked off the list, because, you know, this due date isn’t getting any further away.

We make the trek out Florence to every man’s favorite store, Babies R Us, plus Once upon a Child to score some much needed cash for no-longer-needed maternity clothes.

While waiting our turn at the sales counter, Mindy notices a Jeep stroller, the exact same model & color as ours, on sale for $80. She says something along the lines of “they probably give about half the sale price for these types of items, so let’s keep that in the back of our mind”. (We probably won’t have much use for a single stroller once baby #2 comes along.)

Then I, annoyed that our stroller’s headrest is slightly damaged, examine this stroller’s headrest & see it’s bend backwards in the exact same manner as ours. I say something to Mindy like “oh, I guess all these Jeep strollers have this problem”.

We go about our business, making a few more stops. When we get home around 6, Mindy notices our stroller isn’t on our front porch. (We leave it on the porch during the day & bring it into house overnight.) It’s not inside in the entry way either. Weird. We ask each other if the other one carried it downstairs (because of having brunch guests earlier that day), but we both say no. I check the basement anyway. It’s not there. Oh crap. It’s been stolen.

To make myself feel better, I walk outside to survey the perimeter of the house to see if I inadvertently left it in the side bushes (or some other place which the stroller would have zero chance of being). While outside, I see our neighbors Neil & Sara, and relay the happenings to them.

Since they were at our brunch earlier that day, I ask if they had noticed our stroller on the porch when they came over. They both are pretty confident it wasn’t there when they arrived. This makes me pretty confident that unless ninjas stole the stroller while we were home & awake around 8 a.m., we (read: I) more than likely forgot to bring in the stroller from outside before we went to bed on Friday night.

I think it was Sarah that asks if I thought the stroller at Once upon a Child was ours, but that comment sort of went over my head. The conversation quickly move onto usefulness of reporting this crime to police. Neil, being captain of our block’s neighborhood watch, began his sales pitch on reporting all crimes to police (regardless of the likelihood of apprehension) for more accurate crime stats & so local cops know what to be on the lookout for. I smiled & nodded as he talked, all the while thinking to myself there’s about a zero percent chance of me actually calling the cops.

I go back inside & let Mindy know I was outside talking to Neil & Sarah about what happened. I don’t know how long it took from there, maybe another 30 minutes, but at some point Mindy & I had the joint epiphany: that WAS our stroller at Once upon a Child. (Yeah, we’re both so quick-witted, right?)

I call the store and ask about the orange & black Jeep stroller on sale in the front of the store. A young woman cheerily answers that it’s on sale for $80. I say “I know, but what time was it brought in?” “3 p.m. this afternoon” she says. OK, I’m reasonably certain it’s ours.

I tell her my story. She puts the assistant manager on the phone. Again, I tell my story. She won’t tell me the name of the individual (i.e. thief) that sold the stroller to them and says there’s nothing she can do unless I file a police report. (You have to show an ID to sell items there, but they won’t tell me the seller’s name for privacy reasons…which makes sense, because if the sale happens to be legit, they can’t have me hassling one of their customers.) I ask her to remove the (i.e. our) stroller from the sales floor, and she agrees. I say I’ll be in touch.

Call the cops. A uniform’s at the house in under 10 minutes. Again, I tell the story. I can tell he’s with me & is reasonably sure that the stroller is mine, but talks incessantly about there’s probably no case in the court of law unless we can prove the stroller is ours via a serial number or distinguishing mark. There’s the damaged headrest, but that’s probably not enough. He says that if questioned, the thief can simply say they bought it at a flea market in this condition.

I’m not even sure the thing has a serial number, but even if it did, I’m not sure it would do us any good. My aunt (Carol, do you read this blog?) bought the stroller for us 2+ years ago for Mindy’s baby shower. I’m not going to ask her to go through her old credit card statements to see if the credit card transaction is tied to a serial number.

So we really can’t prove (besides circumstantially) that it’s ours. I decide to file a report anyway, as it would probably be helpful when showing Once upon a Child that we’re serious when we say it’s ours (even if we’re forced to make a moral argument over a legal argument).

I talk the assistant manager once again before the store closes, informing her that I’ve filed a police report, and she seems even more sympathetic than before. She’s now reasonably certain it’s ours but says she can’t do anything until she talks the the store manager who will be in Tuesday morning. She thinks worst case is they’ll sell it back to us for what they paid, which is about half the current sale price, so let’s assume $40. She’s going to talk with him or her first thing Tuesday morning, and asks that I call around 10 or 11.

So that brings me to now…

Why I’m reasonably sure the stroller at Once upon a child is ours:

• Same model & color as ours (we can prove via witnesses that we owned this stroller & if need be go to my aunt’s credit card statements)
• Same headrest damage (we can prove via witnesses that ours had this…just demonstrated this to friends last week)
• Ours was stolen Friday night/Saturday morning; Once upon a Child bought it on Saturday at 3 p.m.

At first I could care less about the criminal prosecution side of things, I just wanted my stroller back. And my feeling is that there's a 50/50 chance of the following 2 options:

1. They sell it back to us at cost ($40), thus are not profiting from selling stolen goods. Because really, the stroller wasn’t stolen from them; it was stolen from us. Why should they be out the $40?
2. They decide to be good community citizens & give it back to us (possibly working with the police to obtain their $40 back from the seller).

Anything worse than the 2 options above would be unacceptable to me, because like I said, they’d be profiting from selling stolen merchandise.

But the more I stew over this, the less I care about getting my property back, and the more I care about catching (or at least, hassling) this thief.

I realize the police have more important things to investigate, but visualize with me for a moment. If this were a murder investigation, and it hinged on figuring out who stole this stroller because it put them at the scene of a crime (unlikely, but work with me here), the cops would do a little digging, right?

First, they’d get the name of the seller from Once upon a Child. They’d question them to figure why they had a stroller in the first place (do they have kids?). If the seller said they were selling it for a friend who had kids and/or bought it from a flea market. The cop would question the friend or flea market vendor, and so on. You’ve seen Law & Order, you know how this goes.

Point is, these questions couldn’t possibly take that much time for the police to pursue. And even if they felt it to be unworthy of their time for $40-80, there’s got to be some indirect/long-run benefit from helping out a faithful taxpayer, no? They want young middle-class families buying homes in this historic district despite the proximity to lower income housing, right?

And getting back to Once upon a Child, should I even be the one to have the force the issue with the cops? When I talk to the store manager tomorrow, shouldn’t he or she simply give me the stroller back the turn the seller’s info over to the cops?

Regardless, I want for my own interest to determine if it was some random passerby or a close neighbor who stole the stroller. It’d a good FYI to know which neighbor is actively trying to rip me off.

So here are my questions…

How forceful should I be with the store about getting my stroller back? Should I accept an offer to buy it back at cost? Or should I demand it back for free?

How much should I press the cops? How should I go about hounding them to investigate?

Should I link the 2 parties together and press Once upon a Child to demand the cops to investigate?

Any thoughts would be beneficial, and we’ll keep you posted with updates.