WENTZVILLE, Mo. – A Wentzville man took down some porch pirates.
His weapon of choice? A security camera he said caught two young men stealing packages right outside his door.
But there is a twist. Twenty-four hours later, one of the teenagers came back to the house with a change of heart.
"It was kind of one of those, you're not going to believe this somebody took our packages,” said Lewis Lucarelli, who noticed his packages went missing Wednesday afternoon.
Lucarelli and his family tried to figure out what happened to their deliveries. They looked through their outdoor camera and realized teenagers took off with them.
“One picked up a package, kind of stepped around the other and the other one picked up the other package and they walked off,” described Lucarelli of the teenagers who stole his deliveries.
“Not that it was something that was that valuable,” he said. “It's just somebody taking something on your porch that was intended for someone for Christmas.”
Lewis took to Facebook.
“It's been tough to keep up with social media today,” Lucarelli said as he scrolled through his Facebook feed. “I'm not used to this much activity."
Someone saw his post, recognized the teenagers and contacted Wentzville Police who arrested one of the two teenagers.
Meanwhile, early Thursday, Lucarelli spotted the second suspect standing right across the street from him.
“And then about a half a second later, it was, 'that's one of the boys,' and then I opened the door and confronted him."
The young man appeared to show a change of heart and had one of the packages in his hand.
“My belief is that he was returning it hoping that he would make the world right again,” Lucarelli said.
Lucarelli talked to the young man for a good 15-20 minutes before police arrived at his house.
"I had about a 15-minute period where he got a little bit of a father-son discussion, that I would be having with my son if he was 14 years old and in that situation about making better choices."
The two suspects are in custody.
Wentzville Police said the two suspects were among three Wentzville teenagers suspected of stealing items from neighborhood cars and taking things from an open garage.
