I love hearing stories like this...people honest to a fault like myself are rare...
Photo clues lead to camera's owner
By BRIAN BERGSTEIN,
AP Technology Writer
Fri Jan 25, 5:46 PM ET
Sitting on the back seat was a nice Canon digital camera. Gunderson asked the driver which previous passenger might have left it, but the cabbie didn't seem to care. So Gunderson brought it home and showed it to her fiance, Brian Ascher. They decided that the only right thing to do was to find the owner.
But how? The only clues were the pictures on the camera: typical tourist snapshots, complete with a visit to the Statue of Liberty. How could they find a stranger among the huddled masses?
Gunderson is busy in finance for Bear Stearns Cos., so the detective quest fell to Ascher, a 26-year-old law student at
He checked whether anyone had reported a matching missing camera to the city's Taxi and Limousine Commission. No dice. He placed ads in lost-and-found sections of Craigslist but got just one response — from a couple in
"I guess they thought their camera had been riding around in a taxi for two months," Ascher recalls now, chuckling at the notion that such a thing would be possible in
The 350 pictures and two videos on the camera showed several adults, an older woman and three children. Half put them at
Ascher easily pinpointed
They also took a pirate-themed boat ride where the kids got mustaches painted on their faces. Ascher zoomed in on the group to see name tags on their shirts. He spotted an Alan, an Eileen, a male Noel and a female Noelle, plus a Ciarnan. Under their names was written "IRE."
When Ascher checked the videos, he saw nothing telling, just the children dancing and swimming. But in the background, he heard Irish accents.
OK, Ascher figured, the camera's owner is from
Ascher called Canon's
He checked the date stamp on the photos from Bob Heilman's and called to inquire whether anyone remembered serving a big Irish group that day. Without the diners' last names, there was no way to check. It's a nice thing you're trying, the manager told Ascher, but you probably just found yourself a new camera.
Enter some fresh eyes. Ascher's mother, Nancy, and sister, Emily Rann, scoured the pictures for clues he might have missed.
"I thought, with all this data in the camera, there's no way we're not going to get it back to them," Nancy Ascher says now. "I was hoping it wasn't going to take a trip to
Ascher's mother and his sister noticed that one of the pictures showed a doorman helping someone into a
After several phone calls and a visit to the hotel to show the pictures around, Nancy Ascher persuaded an employee to search the Radisson's guest records by first name and country of residence. Indeed, a Noel from
Wonderful.
Except that when Noel responded to Brian Ascher, he said he hadn't lost a camera.
By now, school was resuming, and Ascher was prepared to give the camera to his mom so she could take over. She had figured out the name of the
But first Ascher took a final look at the photographs.
He pored over some from Dec. 30 that didn't include the children. The photos showed signs for bars in
Then he stopped on another picture, showing two people outside an apartment building. Seemingly accidentally included in the picture was something Ascher had missed the first time: an awning in the background that read "Standings." Aha! Standings is a bar next to
Ascher found Standings' owner, who reached the bartender who had worked Dec. 30. Yes, he recalled an Irish group. Especially because one of the women was a big tipper and said she worked at another
Ascher soon got an e-mail from a woman named Sarah Casey, whose sister Jeanette works at Playwrights. Suddenly everything Ascher had seen on the camera came to life.
The Caseys recently had hosted relatives and friends from
Sarah Casey agreed to send it to him. It didn't go to
Murphy, an insurance underwriter, had been devastated to lose the pictures from a trip he had planned for years. It was Jan. 10 — his 34th birthday — when he heard he would be getting the photos back. "I was over the moon," he says now. "Best present ever."
"I owe you one," he wrote to Ascher. "It's good to know there are some honest people left in the world."
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