Caught on camera: Pint-sized porch pirate strikes Charlotte homes

CHARLOTTE, N.C. (FOX 46 CHARLOTTE) – It’s a crime that usually increases five months from now around the holidays. But many Charlotte residents said their packages are continuously being stolen off their porches.

A Charlotte woman said it’s happened to her three times already in the last few weeks. 

“On the first incident, they grabbed the packages late at night and sorted through what they did and didn’t want and then tossed the remnants onto a neighbor’s house a couple of doors down. The second incident was the same sort of behavior.”

That led them to get an outdoor security camera to monitor their yard. What they saw next was interesting.

“This young child, who looks maybe between the ages of like 5 and 7, and hid under our tree, and then ran up to the porch and grabbed the package. This was around like 7:30, 8:00, still broad daylight,” she said. 

And that was the third incident. She said she’s called Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police three times and each time filed a report.

“They told me that they’re going to increase patrols in our neighborhood,” she said.

She doesn’t understand why people do this.

“I think that, personally, I have a lot of privilege to not have to worry about being able to purchase things and provide for myself and my family, so I don’t know what it’s like to need to feel like I need to teach my kids how to steal from other people. There are resources out there for people who don’t have what they need. I encourage them to research and find ways to get what you need for your family versus teaching them to steal from strangers and do something that’s incriminating and impact the rest of their lives potentially,” she said to FOX 46 in a phone interview. 

And she hasn’t been the only victim. Her neighbors have had packages stolen as well.

Nine miles away, it’s a similar story for Ashely Dawson. She and her husband recently moved to Charlotte in the Sedgefield neighborhood to open her dental practice. And just like many, she’s no stranger to online orders.

“We officially moved in, fully in May, so we’ve been getting packages probably since February like every day, every week,” Dawson said. 

And then one day, there were no packages.

“We got a notification that Amazon had just dropped off a package, got a picture confirming that package had been delivered. I got home, I asked my husband where our packages were and he had no recollection of a package and of course, I thought he was just kidding. We were able to go back to our video footage and about 20-30 minutes after they were delivered we saw the gentlemen just walking up casually to our doorstep, taking each individual package and casually stack them on top of each other, pause for a second and I think he may have heard something because we do have a dog and we couldn’t see if he got into a car or anything, so it looks like he was on foot,” Dawson said. 

Dawson said this is the first time in her life that she’s ever had anything stolen.

“The fact that someone came onto our property and stole our items…yeah it was violating and frustrating that someone would go to that length.”

Dawson has contacted CMPD as well.