Boston University Police Department used classic gumshoe tactics to recover a stolen silver flute worth $14,000.
A $14,000 stolen silver flute has been recovered in Massachusetts.
The flute was reported stolen from a student in August, according to BUToday. The student had left the flute and an iPad unattended in a classroom for a few minutes, and when she returned, the items were gone.
Kelly Nee, chief of university police, told BUToday that officers put in "dogged gumshoe police work" to solve the case of the silver flute.
Police kicked off their investigation by analyzing the security footage of the classroom, which showed a man leaving the building through a rear exit around the time of the theft. Officers then collected additional footage from nearby street and business cameras, according to BUToday.
One officer flagged the keyword Arista, the maker of the silver flute, while reviewing pawnshop databases in New England, but the broad search term turned up superfluous results.
Eventually, police came into contact with someone who encountered the suspect and knew their first name. With this information, police were able to narrow down the Arista keyword search to about 500 hits, BUToday reported.
Police also discovered a photo of the suspect conducting a transaction at a pawnshop from 2014.
They tracked down the suspect to his home and interviewed him, but they were not able to recover the flute.
However, as police were putting together a search warrant, the suspect actually called the department and agreed to return the flute and iPad. He was been summonsed to court and is scheduled to reappear at a later date, BUToday reports.
Police returned the flute and iPad to the victim.