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Crystal Anson of Worcester shows how she was able to track her stolen car using a cellular phone still in the vehicle

(Brendan McKenna | MassLive)

WORCESTER – It started as just another Wednesday for Worcester resident Crystal Anson.



On her way to work on Oct. 22, Anson and her boyfriend, Joe McCann, made their usual stop for coffee at Acoustic Java in Main South, next to Clark University.



Although McCann normally stays in the car while Anson runs into the shop, the dreary rain of this morning prompted him to park the car and go inside as well.



Two cold-brewed coffees and a few minutes of conversation later, Anson and McCann came out of the storefront to find: nothing. An empty space where minutes ago Anson's car had been.



"I've never felt anything like that before. My stomach dropped," Anson said.

Her first reaction was to wonder if somehow she'd violated a city parking rule and that the car had been towed. She swiftly realized that the five minutes she'd been inside wasn't enough time for that.



"It was just this immediate panic and denial. I didn't think it had happened," she said.

Faced with the missing car she quickly called the Worcester Police Department while the café's owners called Clark University Police, knowing that the university has security cameras posted in the area.



Anson and McCann waited near the scene for about an hour, giving their statements to the police, before she tried to return to her normal routine. She said police told her that most likely the car wouldn't leave the city; that the thief was just using it go to from point A to point B.



Resigned, Anson got a ride into work when she remembered watching a reality TV show where the characters had tracked down a missing cell phone using an app installed on the device. Realizing that her phone was still in the car, Anson logged into her phone's GPS location manager and discovered that the device was no longer in Worcester.

A view of the route of the stolen car.

"It appeared, all of a sudden, he was on Route 20 in Sturbridge. And I was like, if my phone is still with the car, that means my car is in Sturbridge," she said.



From there, Anson contacted the Massachusetts State Police (which Worcester Police had already alerted) and wound up helping them track the car through several towns, being passed from dispatcher to dispatcher passing along location updates every few seconds to patrol officers.

Trooper Matthew Guarino of the Massachusetts State Police, who now works in the media relations office but has extensive experience with patrol and stolen vehicle investigations, said that the use of cell phone tracking is a really interesting new technology and one that is "definitely a tool in our tool box" now.



"It's an up and coming technology and it does have its definite benefits," he said.



Dedicated vehicle tracking systems, Guarino said, have always been rare and are becoming rarer. In his six years working on stolen car cases out of the Foxboro barracks, he only encountered two vehicles equipped that way.



A lot of stolen vehicles, particularly older ones that are chopped up for parts, are never recovered, Guarino said, adding that the vast majority of those he had recovered had been found within a few days in the kind of joy ride crime that Anson described.



But Guarino stressed that under no circumstances should anyone seek to track down a missing phone, or car as in Anson's case, on his or her own.



To emphasize that point, Guarino related a story of how a fellow trooper, whose cell phone was taken from a table at a restaurant while the off-duty officer was in the bathroom, called Guarino once he tracked the device to be sure that an on-duty officer would be present.



"We definitely don't want people taking matters in their own hands, going after a device on their own," he said.

In Anson's case, she called police and shared the information.



After a brief scare when Anson thought the thief might wind up driving her car across the border into Connecticut, she saw the phone moving up and down Southbridge Street between Worcester and Auburn, back and forth until it stopped in a parking lot near the train tracks near Polar Beverages.



Police moved in and found the car and tracked down the thief on foot, Anson said.



"It stopped and within a minute, I was like, 'He's not moving' and that's when they went in," she said.



"I don't think my car would have been recovered without that," she said. "Or at least not in that time period. At 7 a.m. my car was taken and they had it at 10. If I wasn't able to track my car, the guy still would have hit somebody; still would have dumped the car, it would have gotten towed somewhere … I think it would have been a much harder process."

Crystal Anson of Worcester surveys her damaged car, recovered after being stolen

The emotional roller coaster of the day was not over for Anson, however. As it turned out, the thief had been involved in a crash while on the joyride – resulting in “heavy front end damage” that wound up totaling the car – and the cell phone that had been so helpful in tracking the car and thief wound up being impounded as evidence.

Although she still faces the hassles of a possible insurance claim against her for the hit-and-run crash by the thief, the need to buy a new car for herself and other associated difficulties, Anson keeps reminding herself that things could have been worse.

“At least I wasn’t in the car, I didn’t get car-jacked,” she said. “I’ve had accidents before. Cars can be replaced.”