City council candidate loses laptop in downtown Vernon theft

VERNON – A Vernon city council candidate has become the latest victim of theft after her parked car was unlocked with a stick.

Yesterday afternoon, Sept. 28, Sherrilee Franks says she was only going to leave her car parked in a downtown Vernon back alley for a minute. She had locked the doors and parked her car so one side was so close to a wall the door wouldn’t open all the way.

Even so, she came back to find her car had been broken into and her laptop, which she hid under a box in the front passenger's seat, was gone.

“They must have watched me park because they would literally have had to do it right when I left,” Franks says.

She says left a window cracked not even half an inch, so that it wouldn’t be sweltering when she got back. She thinks the thief shaved a stick thin enough to slip through the open window and unlock the door.

“I could actually see the shavings from the stick,” she says.

Franks called the police, knowing there was nothing they could do and asked that no follow up be done. She just wanted the incident reported to aid in police data collection.

Since she posted about the theft on Facebook, she says several people have come forward to tell their stories of being robbed in Vernon.

She has most of the contents of her laptop backed up and hopes people will focus less on her stolen computer and more on the underlying problems that cause theft to be so prevalent in the city.

“It’s not about the laptop it’s about all the issues leading up to the fact that the laptop went missing,” she says.

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