When a Missouri couple’s Kamala Harris campaign sign went missing, they said they tracked it down, confronted the alleged thief and discovered a trunk filled with stolen signage.

“This is the 4th time my sign has been stolen,” Laura McCaskill said in an Oct. 21 Facebook post, sharing a video of the encounter.

Tired of her signs vanishing from her front yard, McCaskill and her partner decided to attach an Apple AirTag to one of them, she said. When it happened again on the night of Oct. 18, they followed the tracker, and it led them to an encounter with the alleged culprit outside a home in the neighboring town of Nixa.

“John and I followed up on this one as it wasn’t just a few but 59 signs on Friday night (perhaps more), were stolen in the neighborhood,” McCaskill said in the post.

The couple talks to someone outside the home, who appears to be a young man or teenager, telling them about the missing sign, explaining that the AirTag brought them there. Then he opens the trunk of an SUV, revealing not one, but dozens of campaign signs.

“This is where they all are,” McCaskill’s partner says in the video.

At that moment, a woman — the accused thief’s mother — walks into frame, grabs several signs and tosses them toward McCaskill, saying “here you go, liberals.”

“Mom, stop that,” he says, then tells her to go inside.

When the couple asks him how many signs there are, he says “approximately 60.”

“I expected to find the AirTag, but not 59 signs. It was kind of like finding a dead body,” McCaskill told KOLR. “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. It was like there was a bounty.”

McCaskill tells him he’s committed a felony, as the signs are about $20 a piece, video shows. That would put the total value of the signs north of $1,000.

When asked why he took the signs, he says he got the idea on social media.

“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.”

“Why did you pick our neighborhood,” she asks.

“I was just in the area, ma’am,” he responds.

The couple had already called Nixa police and were picking up the signs as officers arrived, video shows.

McCaskill says she and others have spoken to police in Springfield, and made police reports.

Springfield police say an investigator is looking into the incident.

_____

©2024 The Charlotte Observer. Visit charlotteobserver.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.