By Bonnie Adams, Contributing Writer
Northborough – Nowadays, most of us use our smart phones to help manage many parts of our lives. So it can be an awful, panicky feeling when that phone is broken or, even worse, missing. That’s the situation Northborough resident Katie Gillespie recently found herself facing when she lost her phone right before she was due to come back home after attending school in England. But thanks to the honesty of a good Samaritan and a kind police officer, Katie now has her phone back.
Katie, the daughter of David and Michelle Gillespie, is a 2012 graduate of Algonquin Regional High School. A junior at Tulane University in New Orleans, she is studying at the Freeman School of Business, majoring in economics and finance with a minor in environmental sciences. For the fall semester of her junior year she studied economics and finance at Cambridge University.
It was a great experience overall, her mother said, as Katie was able to visit many of the great cities of Europe including Paris, Munich, Barcelona, Florence and Prague. Other highlights included playing on Cambridge’s women’s rugby team and visiting the office of English theoretical physicist and cosmologist Stephen Hawking. But shortly before she was due to return to the United States, she lost her phone.
Then, in early January, Michelle received an email from Geoffrey Hawley, a high-tech Crime Unit officer with the Cambridgeshire Constabulary. In the email, Hawley introduced himself and noted that he worked in the force’s computer and phone forensic computer department. Many times members of the public would find items, he said, and then turn them into the department. The department would then in turn attempt to return the items to the original owners. Someone had recently found an iPhone, Hawley told Michelle, that had her number on it as a “call if found.” If she contacted him and gave him some descriptive information, Hawley said, he would then “endeavour to return it to you.”
Normally, the rightful owners would come to the station to retrieve their lost property. As Katie would obviously not be able to do that, Hawley offered to check and see if he would be permitted to send it to her via international mail. Once he got that approval, he had the phone packaged and mailed it to Northborough via international recorded delivery. He also gave Michelle a tracking number and instructions on how to log onto a website so she could see when it was due to be delivered.
He noted that the phone did not appear to have any damage and added that “hopefully it will be OK though and will be with your daughter within a few weeks.”
“I couldn’t believe it,” Michelle said. “First that someone turned the phone in and then that he offered to return it.”
“We were so grateful for his kindness,” she added. “It was really such an amazing thing.”