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SEATTLE — A Seattle woman who had her car ransacked decided to call the thief's mother instead of police to report the crime.
Eliza Webb, 29, woke up one morning to discover that her car had been ransacked and that her running shoes and sunglasses had been stolen, according to ABC News. She also found an unfamiliar black cellphone in the backseat of her car and figured that it must belong to the thief.
Webb said she works with teenagers and didn't want to involve the police if she could find another way to make the thief accountable for his or her actions. She decided to call the person labeled "mom" in the cellphone.
After a few minutes of talking to the suspect's mother, Webb realized that the alleged thief was a 19-year-old male.
"I said, 'This is a very uncomfortable phone call to make,' " Webb told ABC News' Seattle affiliate KOMO. "I have your son's phone and I'm missing some things out of my car and I think they might be two related items. And (the mother) was devastated."
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Webb did not want to identify the teen and his mother, but she went out to their home to meet them and confront the teenager.
"We knocked on the door and he answered in just sort of a defeated look," Webb said. "He looked liked he had been crying."
The teenager told Webb that he had hit 10 more unlocked cars in her neighborhood and he blamed it on a night of drinking that got out of control. Webb said that she talked to the teen and his mother and decided that the teen should go house-to-house with his friend and apologize to the people they had stolen from.
Webb said she hopes the unorthodox justice system would help the teenager to change his ways.
"Sometimes when you get shamed or told that you did something wrong by somebody else, it can stick," she said.
