When a porch pirate walked off with two packages from in front of her mother’s house in Cheyenne on Wednesday, Lindsey Carter didn’t just call police and hope for the best. She went into detective mode.
Armed with doorbell camera video and a challenge to her fellow Cheyenne residents — “Don’t let me down Cheyenne” — Carter put the video online and watched as her neighbors went to work.
Within hours, police were calling Carter to tell her a suspect had been arrested.
People scrutinized the woman captured on camera, looking at everything from her tattoos and hair to her distinctive walk and the SUV she pulled up to the house in.
Others began reporting similar thefts, while names and photos started circulating.
Carter gathered what she could and passed information along for police.
By late Wednesday night, 37-year-old Cheyenne resident Erica White was in the Laramie County Detention Center, booked on three misdemeanor theft counts.
For Carter, it was the end of a whirlwind amateur investigation that began with stolen packages worth about $40, then she quickly recruited a sizable chunk of Cheyenne’s online community as her detective squad.
‘I’m Gonna Find Out’
The packages belonged to Carter’s mother, who lives on Cheyenne’s south side near the Frontier oil refinery.
Carter said nothing like this had happened at the home before.
Her mother gets notifications when someone approaches through her doorbell camera, and ordinarily there isn't much activity they don't recognize.
When the cameras picked up a woman with a long, blonde ponytail wearing black pants and a black polo shirt walking up and snagging packages, Carter said her mother called her immediately.
Her mother had ordered a shirt and a small purse, valued around 40 bucks, but that wasn't the point.
“My mom spends good money on her stuff, and it is frustrating when somebody takes your stuff,” Carter said.
The Carter got mad.
She travels back and forth from Colorado and sometimes has her own deliveries sent to her mother's house. What if it had been something more valuable? Carter said she routinely has groceries delivered, for instance.
“We’ve never had this happen in our neighborhood before,” Carter said. “And I was just like, 'I’m gonna find out who this person is, and hopefully the town of Cheyenne will help me.'”
Cheyenne Gets To Work
Carter got the doorbell video from her mother and posted it to a Cheyenne community Facebook group. Then Cheyenne went to work.
The video had amassed thousands of views by Wednesday afternoon, and residents began poring over the video for anything that might help identify the woman.
Others tried to identify the SUV the woman got into — packages in hand — and drove off in, with commenters narrowing it down to an early-2000s Chevrolet Trailblazer.
“I had multiple people reach out to me saying they thought they knew who it was,” she said.
Carter said she talked with one of her mother's neighbors and tried to determine whether anyone could recognize the vehicle.
She asked people for anything concrete they could provide — a full name, a partial license plate, anything she could turn over to law enforcement.
“I was just asking all these questions,” Carter said. “Is it possible to get me, like, a license plate number or partial number or anything, a name, first and last name? If you can help me, I’ll give it to the law enforcement officer that helped my mom out and go from there.”
Then something else started happening.
People began telling Carter they had their own stories of porch piracy.
“Multiple people reached out to me — ‘Oh, she stole my packages too, and I have video footage of the same girl,’” Carter said.
A Name Emerges
As information came in, Carter said the same name kept emerging: Erica White.
Once she had a full name, Carter searched Facebook and began comparing publicly available photographs with the woman recorded on her mother's porch.
One detail particularly caught her attention: the tattoo.
“I looked at her photo. I said, ‘This has to be her,’” Carter said.
She compared additional photographs and believed the tattoo appeared on the same arm and was similar in size to the one visible in the doorbell video.
Carter said she provided the information she gathered to law enforcement, then around 2 a.m. Thursday, police notified her mother that an arrest had been made.
Three Theft Counts
Investigators say Carter's mother's porch wasn't the only one hit.
The investigating officer determined packages were stolen from three locations in Cheyenne between Sept. 25 and Sept. 30, culminating in White's arrest late Wednesday.
White was booked into the Laramie County Detention Center at 11:13 p.m. Thursday on three misdemeanor theft counts involving property valued at less than $1,000.
White, 37, is a Cheyenne resident, Laramie County Sheriff's Office spokesman Brandon Warner said.
She was booked on three counts of misdemeanor theft involving property valued at less than $1,000.
No bond had been set as of Thursday afternoon, Warner said.
The booking information references a probable cause affidavit, but that document was not publicly available on Thursday.
Kolby Fedore can be reached at kolby@cowboystatedaily.com.
