adjacent property 8 months before the first theft. She was 57, former nonprofit development director, now a community engagement specialist, which appeared to mean she had strong and organized beliefs about how communities should share resources and the social confidence to act on those beliefs. The first theft happened on a Thursday morning in November, 3 months after she moved in.
I came outside to bring in wood for the evening and found the stack eight pieces short of where I had left it the previous evening. The gap was too regular to be wind related and too large to be my own miscounting. I said nothing initially. I added a count notation to the stack and checked it daily for a week. By the end of the week, 12 more pieces were gone.
I knocked on Karen's door. She was warm and somewhat surprised and said she had indeed taken some wood. She had run low unexpectedly and had assumed the stack was, as she described it, a shared resource for the neighborhood given its placement near the fence line. I said it was not a shared resource. I said it was my firewood from my ranch and that it was stacked where it was because that was where it was convenient for me to stack it.
She said she understood and would of course reimburse me and hoped there were no hard feelings. She did not reimburse me. And the wood continued disappearing. I installed the trail camera in month three after seven confirmed theft events and after Theodore Castellanos, our neighbor two properties down who had a clear sightline to the fence, had come to tell me that he had watched Karen reach over the fence and take wood on two separate occasions. The trail camera was a commercial wildlife monitoring unit, the same equipment Garrett used professionally in his field work, motion-activated, weatherproof, high-resolution with a 30-second video clip for each activation.
I positioned it to cover the wood pile completely with the camera body inside my property line and the field of view covering the stack and the fence line. I had consulted with Garrett before installing it. He had confirmed that Colorado law permitted the use of security cameras on private property to document activity on that property, that the camera did not extend its view into Karen's property beyond what was visible from my own property line, and that the footage would be legally admissible documentation of any activity it captured. I began the documentation log simultaneously. It was an operational log formatted the way I formatted every agricultural system log I had developed in 22 years: date, time, event, quantity, cumulative total, supporting evidence reference.
Each entry cross-referenced the camera timestamp. In 11 months, the log had 467 documented theft events and a cumulative total of 412 pieces of firewood, which I had valued at the current market rate for seasoned split oak in Garfield County. The total value was 1,236 dollars. Petty theft in Colorado is a class one petty offense for amounts under 300 dollars. Above 300 dollars, it becomes theft proper.