The request is simple.
Return the digital-camera chip.
The response is complicated.
When you set out to do the wrong thing, why would you want to make things right?
Still, Katie Peerenboom’s parents spent their lives teaching their daughter that people are basically good. In the school of eternal optimism, redemption is worth a try.
So if you’re the 40-ish woman who stole a little girl’s purse from the dressing room at Kohl’s department store in Parker on New Year’s Eve, please remove the chip from the digital camera that was in the purse and send it to:
The Peerenbooms, 4430 N.W. 52nd Terrace, Topeka, KN, 66618.
You can have the camera, though it was a hand-me-down gift to Katie from her big sister, Jennifer.
You can have the new child’s purse with the Hello Kitty wallet, though you’ll look silly using either.
You can have the gift cards, though a 12-year-old squirreled away some of them from her birthday in October in order to pool them with Christmas gift cards.
You can have the cash, though it came from the savings account of a thrifty sixth-grader who hoped to do some grown-up shopping.
Just send back the digital-camera chip with the images of her holiday stay with her cousins in Parker – the dogs, the ice skating and, of course, all the snow. The camera chip with these images is the only thing Katie can’t replace.
That and her sense of security.
Katie and her mom saw the woman they believe stole her purse. She was waiting outside the dressing room where Katie had been trying on clothes. The woman entered as Katie left.
“When I was done trying on clothes, I was thinking of other stuff,” Katie said. “But I usually push the strap up on my purse. When I went to do that, it wasn’t there. But I knew I’d taken it in the dressing room.”
“She was proud of her purse,” Maryann Peerenboom said of her daughter.
Maryann and Katie Peerenboom were back at the dressing room within a minute of the child leaving. They waited for the woman inside to come out. Finally, after several minutes, Maryann Peerenboom called to the person inside, “Do you see a purse in there?”
“No,” came the curt reply.
A few minutes later, the woman in the dressing room came out and took off quickly through the store, the elder Peerenboom said. The woman carried a large leather purse. She wore a leather coat.
“I stepped into the dressing room,” Maryann Peerenboom said. “There were no clothes in it, even though there had been some when Katie left.”
There was also no purse.
Mother and daughter looked carefully around the dressing room. They looked under the racks of clothes where Katie had shopped. Then, they hurried to Kohl’s officials.
The store’s staff did the best it could. Workers checked surveillance tapes looking for the woman who had been in the dressing room. They checked all over the store to see if the purse had been otherwise misplaced.
Then, it was final. Katie Peerenboom was officially a crime victim.
She lost $120 in gift cards and cash, and a camera worth about the same amount.
“At first, I was kind of mad at myself,” said Katie, who got nauseous at the prospect of the theft.
Store officials told her it was not her fault. So did her mom.
“I told her it was just stuff and that the only thing she lost that she couldn’t replace were the pictures,” said Maryann Peerenboom. “I told her she was lucky she didn’t get hurt.”
At least not physically.
What Katie lost – in addition to her purse, her wallet, her camera, her gift cards and her cash – was some faith in humanity. “Mostly,” she said, “I learned to just take care of what you have. Don’t be careless.”
The child seems to get it.
The adult who stole her innocence probably never will. But in the miraculous case that she does, she now knows where to send the proof.
Jim Spencer’s column appears Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Reach him at 303-954-1771 or jspencer@denverpost.com.
