Daily Sitka Sentinel

Sitkans Turn Tables on Holiday Market Thief

By ABIGAIL BLISS
Sentinel Staff Writer
    When a bag of valuables was stolen from Ruth McMaster’s parked truck at Juneau’s Public Market Sunday, she took matters into her own hands. The next day, she returned to Sitka with the stolen goods back in her possession.

Ruth McMaster shows a screenshot on her iPhone indicating the location of her stolen handbag in Juneau. McMaster and her husband successfully recovered the bag and contents. (Sentinel Photo by James Poulson)

    McMaster and her husband, Gary, had spent the weekend selling their handmade soaps at the market at Juneau’s Centennial Hall. They closed up shop on Sunday around 5 p.m. and were loading their vehicle in the parking lot when Gary realized he had left his cell phone inside. The couple ran back into the building and, in their haste, left their truck unlocked.
    “We were both pretty frantic about finding the phone,” McMaster recalled. “The truck that we took to Juneau had manual locks; you had to push the button, old-school style. We were just thinking about the phone and ran back in without locking it.”
    When they returned, having failed to recover the lost cell phone, McMaster discovered that the reusable shopping bag containing her iPad, her purse, and over $3,000 from the weekend’s cash sales was missing, too.
    Immediately, she called the Juneau police and pulled out her iPhone, through which she could track the location of the missing iPad. It would take the police over an hour to send someone their way.
    In the meantime, McMaster and her husband headed to the apparent vicinity of the iPad and did some sleuthing of their own.
    “It was a block and a half away from the Centennial building on a side street,” McMaster said. “We went over and started searching the perimeter. We were looking in cars with our flashlight, knee deep in snow – trailers, garbage cans, a few houses – and talked to everybody at least twice, begging for information.”
    When the officers showed up at the scene, they took down McMaster’s information, took up the search themselves, and advised the couple to head back to their hotel room. Around 10 p.m., still empty-handed and without authorization to search inside buildings, the officers gave up the hunt, too.
    At the hotel, McMaster canceled her credit cards. Using the same app that allowed her to track the iPad’s location, she penned a message that would appear on its screen alongside her phone number: “This iPad has been lost. I pray that you return it. There will be a reward.” Every 15 to 20 minutes, she would use one of the app’s features to make her iPad beep in its new location in the hopes that someone besides the thief might hear it.
    And, all night, from her hotel room, McMaster monitored the unmoving iPad on her phone. At 6:45 a.m. Monday, the dot on her screen began to move.
    She called the police to relay the news, but, once again, they weren’t able to send timely assistance and the McMasters struck out themselves.
    “We didn’t want to wait for the call or for them to show up,” McMaster said. “We got dressed and hopped in our vehicle.”
    The iPad appeared to be hovering on a set of steps between Willoughby Avenue and Calhoun Avenue on a pedestrian cut-through inaccessible to cars. The couple parked their truck nearby and spotted someone on the stairs.
    “I could see there was a streetlight that illuminated a man standing on the steps. According to my iPhone, he had been there for 10 to 15 minutes, just standing on the stairs,” McMaster recalled.
    Gary jumped from the truck and charged toward the man, who threw off the backpack he’d been wearing and took off sprinting in turn.

    Inside the dropped backpack was McMaster’s reusable shopping bag. It still contained all but a few of her belongings. While the iPad was there, two pairs of shoes she had stored alongside it were gone. The $2,500 from cash sales early in the weekend remained, but the envelope with the $600 from Sunday was missing.
    “The money from the previous days was in a sandwich-sized holiday bag,” McMaster said. “Just a paper lunch bag. Who doesn’t open everything up when you’ve stolen something? Obviously, I don’t think this guy was a professional crook.”
    Although her husband’s phone is still missing and Sunday’s cash sales were not recovered, McMaster is back in Sitka and counting her blessings.
    “It just seems so amazing that we got it back,” she said. “I must say that, before we went to bed, I had already decided that losing everything – the bag, the iPad, everything – wasn’t going to end my life. It’s only money. It’s only material items. It could have been a lot worse.”