Patty Mulligan Uses Craigslist to Turn Tables on Crook

Patty Mulligan turned the tables on a crook and won.

Patty’s daughter, Hedy Mulligan, 11, was born with a chromosome disorder that left her mentally disabled.  Therefore, Hedy uses a special computer with a touchscreen to communicate with the others.

During the Thanksgiving holiday, however, Patty loaded up the family car outside her brother’s home and accidentally left the $10,000 computer sitting on the curb.  By the time she realized what she had done and went back to look for the device, it was gone.

“It was devastating,” says Patty. “It’s a piece of equipment that is so important to Hedy.”

Mulligan went into detective mode.  When her insurance company wouldn’t pay for another machine, she put up signs throughout her brother’s neighborhood in San Jose.

When that eventually proved unsuccessful, she turned to Craigslist.

Then she saw it: an ad from someone selling a DynaVox for $3,500 (one-third the usual price) that sounded an awful lot like the one especially programmed for her daughter.

She called the seller.

“I played dumb and asked him a lot of questions,” Mulligan said. “He said he bought it in a storage locker sale.”

She agreed to meet with the seller, and then she immediately called the police and asked them to accompany her to the meet.

The entourage met up with one Mr. James Durr, 42, who just happened to have a DynaVox with the exact same serial number as Hedy’s machine.

Durr was immediately taken into custody on some unrelated outstanding warrants for possession of stolen property. The District Attorney for Santa Clara County is now considering felony charges for misappropriation of lost or stolen goods.

“What happens is this guy is riding his bike and he sees a laptop computer in a bag and takes it,” said Sgt. Ronnie Lopez. “It becomes disingenuous when he starts to research it, finds out it’s worth $10,000 and tries to sell it.”

The moral of this story is: thieves beware.  Parents can, and will, do anything for their kids.

We tip our hat to you, Patty Mulligan, for beating a crook at his own game.

“We were in disbelief that we had actually recovered it,” Mulligan says. “It just seemed like it was gone.”

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