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We’re in the final two weeks before the U.S. presidential election, which means that it’s currently peak campaign-sign-stealing season. Indeed, one woman in Missouri says she grew so tired of the Kamala Harris lawn signs being taken out of her yard that she affixed an Apple AirTag to one of them. The tracker led to a nearby house where she witnessed a huge trove of stolen signs.
Laura McCaskill, of Springfield, Missouri, told local news outlet Ozarks First that, after her Harris/Walz signs were stolen off her lawn four separate times, she decided to use the tracker to investigate who was taking her political paraphernalia. She and her partner followed the tracker’s beacon to the nearby town of Nixa, where they knocked on the door of a local house where the AirTag appeared to be emanating. A woman came to the door, McCaskill said: “She finally came up and we said hello, and we said we think that you have something in that car that was taken from our neighborhood.” McCaskill went on: “She said, that was her son’s car and she said, ‘Well, he’s just an idiot’ and then she goes back in and we thought that was interesting.”
The woman eventually went and got her son, who then admitted to McCaskill that he had her sign in the trunk of his car. The young man opened the car’s trunk and inside was a trove of stolen Harris/Walz signs. McCaskill claimed seeing the signs was somewhat unsettling, akin to stumbling upon a “dead body.”
“I expected to find the AirTag, but not 59 signs. It was kind of like finding a dead body. It was like are you kidding me? Most people, they take them and they throw them in a dumpster or they throw them in someone else’s yard,” she said. McCaskill recorded much of the encounter on her phone and later posted it on her Facebook page where she’s been rallying her neighbors to file charges with the local police.
When questioned by McCaskill and her partner about why he had taken the signs, the young man didn’t have much of an explanation. He can be heard on McCaskill’s video saying: “I saw it on TikTok. I saw a guy … that filled his house up with some buddies,” he says. “I’m not saying it’s right or anything.”
“This is pervasive theft. This was calculated. This is a different level,” McCaskill told the local outlet. “My son said, you know, the best thing that you can do is to shame the behavior and he said to post it.” She claims she has also filed a police report over the theft. Gizmodo reached out to the Springfield Police Department for more information and will update this story if it responds.
In an update on Wednesday, McCaskill said that police are in the process of compiling the various reports and nothing will be released until the investigation is complete.
