Video Shows Woman Stealing Halloween Candy Left Out For Kids
By Cameron Glenn
SACRAMENTO (CBS13) - It's a case of adults behaving badly. A woman says she left a bowl of candy on her porch on Halloween night, only to have it stolen -- bowl and all -- right off her porch. And the thief wasn't who she expected to see.
Rachel Patteson and boyfriend Miles had recently bought a home in a new development near Northgate Boulevard and Ford Road in Sacramento.
"Prior to that [we] lived in apartments that got little to no Halloween traffic," she said.
They were looking forward to their first Halloween in their new home and spent the first part of the evening handing out candy. But as the night wore on, they eventually decided to leave and get some food.
"So we printed up a sign and sat the candy out," she said.
They set the bowl of candy out on the porch around 8:10 p.m., along with a sign that read: "Happy Halloween please only take a couple of pieces so that everyone can have some".
Over the course of the next 20 minutes, a couple of groups of kids came by. They were good, Patteson says, and each took a couple pieces of candy.
Then at 8:30 p.m., a black pickup truck stopped in front of the home and a woman got out of the passenger's seat. She walked up to the home, picked up the bowl, then quickly took it back to the truck and drove away.
What the thief didn't know was the porch was being monitored by a doorbell camera system.
"It happened so fast we didn't get a chance to activate the speaker and say something to her," said Patteson, adding she was surprised the thief was an adult. "We fully expected some teenager to take all the candy."
The entire incident took only a few seconds but to the couple, it wasn't a playful prank. The kids who came after looked around for the candy, which at that point, was long gone.
We asked Patteson if she had a message for the thief, and here's what she said:
"I know you probably don't care but the kids that showed up after you took the candy were disappointed. I know because I saw the videos of them looking around our porch trying to find the candy. I hope someone you know sees this and they give you a hard time about it. Maybe then you might feel some shame."
Patteson isn't going to press charges. But says she hopes someone knows the thief, and that she feels shame for what she did.
As for leaving candy out next year, Patteson says, "We probably won't sit candy out again. If we aren't going to be home we will probably just turn off the front porch light."