A Salt Lake City couple have gone to Craigslist in an effort to retrieve a valuable piece of stolen property: A plastic figurine of a sailor.
"You know where I live," reads the ad, labeled "A plea to the thief." "If you could please, please just leave the Playmobil man in our mailbox, or on the porch, or somewhere nearby, it would mean the world to me."
Natalie Tippets, a University of Utah employee touring the state this week with new university president David Pershing, placed the notice on the classified-ad website from the road Tuesday night, soon after her husband, Julian, discovered the burglary in their home near the U.
The thief took Julian's new laptop computer, an iPad and some of his cuff links, Tippets said Thursday from Ephraim. But the one irreplaceable item was the Playmobil sailor boy — a gift to Natalie from Julian's mother, Susan Tippets, who died on May 30.
"I remember her hands rubbing over his little hat," Natalie Tippets said, recalling how her mother-in-law said the figurine reminded her of Julian, who at the time had gone on a mission for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
Tippets said she and her husband, an intern with the Governor's Office of Economic Development who starts law school this fall, are insured for the electronics and other items. "The rest of it is just stuff," she said.
Getting the sailor figurine, she said, is probably "a lost cause," but she had to try something to get it back. "The only thing I knew to do was to go on Craigslist," she said.
