Girls smoking weed in stolen car get caught after accidentally apparently uploading video to cloud
A family returning from a Hawaiian vacation to find their home ransacked and their BMW stolen may have gotten a glimpse into what happened when video of three teenagers smoking pot in the family's car appeared on their phone.
Tiana Le and her husband Toai Tran returned home from their trip on Feb. 10 to discover their home in total disarray.
"I go to my bedroom and I noticed everything was ransacked through. I saw my wife's purses on the floor and that's how I knew we got burglarized," Tran told San Francisco ABC station KGO, which broke the story. As Tran talked to KGO reporter Dion Lim, he showed her photos of the couple's clothes and valuables strewn on the floor. Their black BMW was also missing.
A few days later, on Feb. 14, Tran was on his iPhone and a strange video popped up.
"There was this random video on my phone," he said. It showed three teenage girls smoking marijuana, drinking and waving cash.
"Your makeup looks so good! Like, your skin," One girl is heard telling her friend, who is packing buds of weed into a large multicolored glass bong.
The video seemed to have nothing to do with Tran until he noticed that it was filmed inside his car. He also recognized his wife's wallet. Tran said he believes the teenagers filmed the joyride on the couple's iPad, and it was uploaded to the cloud.
"The girl's videos were filmed by the girls using my husband’s iPad. And it got uploaded to his iCloud account," Le told ABC News on Tuesday.
Le put the video on Facebook because she "wanted some identification of who they are," because after talking to the police, "I felt like they weren't going to do anything."
The video went viral. So viral, in fact, that eventually, someone flagged it to the mother of one of the girls in the video. The girl's mother, Elizabeth, contacted Le, and told her it was her daughter, according to KGO. It turns out the family lived down the street from the Trans.
Elizabeth's 16-year old daughter told KGO, "we were smoking, and just listening to music...we were just recording on the iPad."
"I felt violated," Le told ABC News in a text message. "I’m just shocked that it was my neighbor."
"No one from San Jose Police Department touched base with us about the case. When Dion called them yesterday, they had no idea a video existed," Le wrote, adding that her husband emailed the police the video on Feb. 11.
On Tuesday, a spokesman for the San Jose Police Department told ABC News in an email that a "detective has called the victims but has not been able to make contact with them. However, detectives have done extensive follow-up on the case already."
