Man returns BYU photographer’s stolen laptop after buying it online


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PROVO — Something didn’t feel right after Austin Butler purchased a used MacBook online.

The password the seller gave him didn’t work, and the story the man told him about the laptop belonging to his fiancée didn’t seem to be adding up. Once he started looking closer, Butler found there were still thousands of photos of weddings, missionary shoots and other events on the laptop.

Since the situation “felt kind of fishy,” Butler said he decided to go into the laptop’s information files and located the owner’s name.

“I was thinking to myself, if I had a laptop stolen probably the first thing I would do would be vent about it on social media,” he said. “I looked her name up on social media and I found her Twitter account and lo and behold, a day earlier she had tweeted about how she had a laptop stolen from her with a ton of pictures, and how she was a wedding photographer and didn’t have any of those photos backed up.”

Abby Keenan, a freshman at Brigham Young University, put her backpack in an unlocked cubby at the school’s Cannon Center before she ate lunch with friends Tuesday. When she returned, the laptop and all of its contents were gone.

She reported the theft to campus police, who reviewed a security tape that showed a man wearing a hat and jacket walking past the cubbies storing backpacks multiple times before taking hers while no one was looking.

Keenan works as a photographer and videographer and said the backpack contained all of her work, including a laptop and hard drive, in addition to her scriptures and a book from one of her classes.

There were photos from a wedding, two family shoots and a missionary shoot on the laptop. Unedited versions of the wedding and two of the other shoots were still on a camera at home, but everything else was stolen, including all of her past photo shoots she stored on the external hard drive.

“I was going to contact the people of the photos I lost and that was hard,” she said. “I talked to my family about it and then I sent out a tweet. I said, ‘I’ve lost my laptop and my hard drive.’ I was just kind of bummed out, not thinking much of it, just (wanting) to let people know on BYU campus that a guy was stealing stuff.”

Keenan said she had resigned herself to the idea that the laptop was gone and wiped when she received a tweet from Butler on her way to class Wednesday. He told her to give him a call because he thought he could help with the situation.


I was thinking to myself, if I had a laptop stolen probably the first thing I would do would be vent about it on social media.

–Austin Butler


“It’s honestly so nice to know there are people who are out there looking for stolen things, and that with social media you can (connect) like that,” she said. “He said if I hadn’t tweeted that, he wouldn’t have found me.”

Keenan went with a police officer to Sandy to meet Butler later that night. He returned the laptop and provided contact information for the man who sold it to him, in addition to a screen shot of the ad the man posted on KSL.com.

BYU police made contact with the seller, who ultimately returned the backpack and all of the other contents, including the hard drive. Detectives are investigating to see if there are any related cases involving the same man, according to Lt. Arnold Lemmon.

He said the alleged thief has not yet been arrested because he doesn’t present a flight risk, but that he will be charged for the theft. It will likely be a misdemeanor offense, according to Lemmon.

Contributing: Ashley Kewish

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