Stolen Photos Returned To Orange County Bride's Family

RANCHO SANTA MARGARITA, CA — With a flurry of pre-holiday packages stolen off front porches in Orange County one package stealing "grinch" found their holiday spirit and returned a special gift. But it wasn't toys, a new iPhone or a box full of presents this porch pirate took, but a box of custom wedding photos belonging to the parents of a new bride in Rancho Santa Margarita.

Brittany Hale first shared the video on her Facebook page on Christmas Eve, the anger and hurt in her tone palpable to all who read it, sharing her raw emotions of the thief who stole the box full of memories off of her parent's front porch.

"I hope those personalized wedding photos were worth your time," she quipped, before mentioning that a police report was filed. Hale, and others in Rancho Santa Margarita, voiced the despair at others who would steal packages left on front porches right before Christmas.

That video quickly went viral as it was shared across social media and local news channels. In it, the thief is seen as a woman wearing a Disneyland windbreaker her face covered as she brazenly removes the packages from the front porch. But it only took a week of public shaming for that woman to change her mind.

On New Year's Eve, the unidentified woman rectified her bad decision of stealing and returned the packages to the same porch, in the same box. Hale and her family wrongly assumed the photos would have just been destroyed, Hale said on Facebook. Instead, their 2018 began with a sigh of relief and the joy of knowing their stolen wedding photos were returned.

"...the lady that stole them had the heart to return them," she wrote in an updated post. "I am thankful that (she) did the right thing and returned what was not hers. I can only hope she has learned a lesson from stealing other people’s property."

Surveillance Photo, with permission of Brittany Hale, via Facebook