Julie Sayers lost her purse, credit cards and personal information to car prowlers recently. They smashed out her car’s window while she was parked at the Silverdale Rotary Gateway Park — a place all too common for such break-ins.
Yet for all the agony she went through dealing with the theft, she was more angry with what happened next.
She found that the culprits “tested” one of her credit cards by making a $1 transaction at a nearby gas station. Then, they went inside a grocer — also nearby — to spend serious money on her card.
It makes Sayers wonder why no one thinks it suspicious to buy $1 in gas. But that’s beside the point to her, which is this: the thieves are clearly not trying all that hard in victimizing car owners at the Gateway park’s lot. Broken glass on the ground there is a common sight, she points out.
“I think it is time for Silverdale citizens to take back their lot and Clear Creek Trail and not let these brazen crooks get away with this,” she wrote me in an email.
She wonders if surveillance cameras are the answer. In the mean time, a new dog park’s going in near the lot, one that will remove a berm that should make it more visible from the road.
Her own story does have a little happy ending to it: a good Samaritan found her purse and its contents while Geocaching near the Kitsap Mall.
