An 11-year-old Connecticut girl has probably made her art teacher proud after she sketched a stick figure of a suspected serial burglar in her area, which cops were able to use to arrest the alleged criminal. Rebecca DePietro drew the doodle for the Stratford police after officers visited her home — which had recently been broken into — and asked if her family had seen anyone suspicious. DePietro had, and she “was like, I could draw a picture of him.”
Her artistic style is clean and uncluttered, just a blank sheet of white computer paper and a pencil. It took her just two minutes. “It wasn’t like the best picture,” DePietro admitted. “It was just a head and some legs and a hat. After I thought about it in the morning I was like, he’s probably just going to crumple it up and throw it out.”
The police did no such thing. They took the sketch and somehow matched it to the image of the suspect. Cops were able to arrest the burglar, who confessed to ten break-ins in the area. Authorities were also able to recover some of the stolen goods.
DePietro was honored for her intrepid police work last night, though a fair amount of credit should go to the Stratford cops, because they really made a creative leap from a skinny Santa Claus–looking character to the alleged burglary suspect. As for DePietro, she said she “had to give a lot of credit to her art teacher,” but added that she isn’t sure she actually wants to be a police-sketch artist when she grows up, and for that we can’t really blame her.
