In this document:
On Friday, May 10, 2019, I got up quite late (around 9 AM, compared to my usual 6 AM). Timeline of theft:
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10:37 AM: I took the Millbrae BART (train 445) at North Berkeley around 10:37 AM, heading to work at San Bruno.
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10:40 AM: When the train arrived in downtown Berkeley, an individual in my train car snatched my laptop from me and ran. I ran after him, leaving my bag behind. I reported to the station agent and BART Police officer.
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11:30 AM: I left the downtown Berkeley BART station to go to Powell Street to pick up my bag, which had been turned in.
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12:15 PM: I picked up my bag from the Powell Street police booth.
Journey from North Berkeley BART to downtown Berkeley BART (Friday, May 10, 2019, 10:37 AM to 10:40 AM)
At around 10:37 AM, I got on to the last car of a 5-car San Francisco/Millbrae train (train 445). I sat on a rear-facing window seat somewhere roughly midway between the two train doors on the left side of the train. When I got on, there was a group of kids also seated in the middle of the train car (but closer to the front train door of the train car). They looked like they were of school age. It was a mix of males and females. Most but not all of them were black.
They appeared to notice me and seemed to be saying something about me, but i assumed those were just kid jokes. One of them also touched my hair while the train was in the journey from North Berkeley to downtown Berkeley. Again, I dismissed this as a childish prank.
During this journey, I was working on my 13'' Space Gray Macbook Pro laptop, using my OnePlus 3 phoen for hotspot. My very last action on the laptop was to close a GitHub issue in a work repository.
The train arrived at downtown Berkeley around 10:40 AM. After the train doors opened, one of the individuals from the group snatched my laptop and exited through the rear door of the car. Without thinking, I chased him, leaving my bag and phone behind. I almost caught up with him but could not grab him. He jumped the turnstiles at the northern entrance to the downtown Berkeley BART and then continued exiting.
Most of the other people in the group also exited at the same station, but they all used their Clipper cards or other payment methods to exit, rather than jumping the turnstile. Their level of involvement with the theft isn't clear.
I immediately reported the situation to the station agent at the booth. She called the BART Police and also asked the other stations down the line if they had received a turned-in bag (the one that I had left on the train).
After around 10 minutes, a BART Police officer came by. The first priority of the police officer and the station agent was to help me recover my bag. The police agents did try looking for the bag in the train at Oakland but did not find it. However, some passengers did report seeing the bag. Finally, it was turned in at Civic Center and then given to the Powell Street police booth. It looked like the bag had been rummaged through and the phone and some coins removed from it. I was asked to pick the bag up from Powell Street.
The officer took my statement. I also asked the officer about the likelihood of recovery. He said that recovery was quite unlikely because the laptop would turn over quite quickly. He also said that even though the train cameras would likely have caught the perpetrator, he was likely not in the system yet so BART Police would not be able to identify him in real life.
The officer gave me his card with his email address and asked me to send him any further information over email.
At 11:30 AM, I took the train from downtown Berkeley to Powell Street, got off there (around 11:55), then went to the police booth. The booth was locked so I used the phone right outside to dial in. I was asked to wait for the Community Service Officers to come by with the bag. They came by and gave me the bag. I confirmed that the phone was no longer in it. This was completed around 12:15.
Recovery was significantly complicated by a few factors:
- Simultaneous loss of both laptop and phone
- The phone number on some of my accounts was an older phone number, so I had to recover two phone numbers rather than one
It was, however, helped by a few factors:
- Work-related stuff was recovered with the help of other people at work
- I didn't lose any of my payment cards, cash, or identifications (such as the California state ID)
- Since my laptop had encryption, my data wasn't compromised
- Since most of my active work is synced with GitHub, or otherwise in the cloud, I lost very little data
I exited the BART at Powell Street around 12:15 PM, then went to the Apple Store at Union Square (about a 7-minute walk from the station). After looking at the laptops on display and discussing with the store salesperson, I purchased a new $1199 ($1305 after taxes) Macbook Air 13'' space gray laptop. The purchase was executed at 12:33 PM according to the receipt.
After purchasing my laptop, I then went back to the Powell Street BART and took the train to work (at San Bruno). I got in at work at around 1:20 PM.
After getting in at San Bruno, I installed my new laptop, then set up various authentication keys. All the setup and account recovery steps that were immediately needed were completed by around 5:30 PM. In addition to work-related recovery, I also initiated recovery procedures for personal accounts (Facebook and Gmail).
Then, I started documenting the recovery steps for future reference by others. I would continue this documentation work over the next few days; people in my company can see the work at ER-727.
I left work a little after 6 PM along with other work colleagues.
On Saturday May 11, after lunch, I went to the T-Mobile store at downtown Berkeley and purchased a new phone. I also associated my existing phone number to the new phone. The phone purchase happened around 5:10 PM.
I opted for the cheapest phone available in the T-Mobile store, namely, a Motorola e5. I played around with that and a lot of other phones to see if there was any material difference in usability of the most common features I would like to use, but didn't see any. The phone price was $150. I had to pay $25 for the recovery SIM card, and taxes added an extra $32. In total I paid around $207.
Over that day and the next, I set up various apps and authentications on the phone, including reinstating two-factor authentication for various services for which it had been temporarily disabled.
I was able to recover my personal Gmail on Sunday May 12 evening after Gmail support removed the two-factor authentication on the account.
After recovering personal Gmail, I was also able to recover GitHub (my GitHub recovery codes were recorded in my personal Gmail). Next, I was able to email the serial number of my stolen laptop to the BART Police officer (the receipt for the laptop purchase was in my Gmail inbox).
I had an older phone number but the device for that number had died out; unfortunately some of my accounts were still tied to the old number. Their device-based 2FA was tied to the stolen phone, but the number was that of the older phone.
To recover this, I had to purchase a new SIM card for the old number ($25 + taxes), then swap that in whenever I needed authentication of the old number. I did this purchase on Tuesday May 14 at the T-Mobile store in the Tanforan Mall in San Bruno (during a short break from work).
After getting the SIM card for the older number, I was able to recover Facebook and Venmo and initiate recovery for Coinbase.
On April 2, 2020, at around 9 AM PDT, a BART Police officer called me and told me that, based on footage in the BART train car, BART had identified the likely suspect who stole my laptop and phone. The suspect does not yet know that he is suspected. The suspect is not currently suspected of any other incidents. The officer considered it pretty unlikely that my laptop or phone could be retrieved.
I had the option to come to the station at Lake Merritt BART to try to identify the suspect from a photo lineup of six people (so not a physical, in-person lineup).
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If I came to identify the suspect, and succeeded in identifying the suspect from the lineup: They would file for an arrest warrant. However, the police officer was skeptical of whether the district attorney would approve of the arrest warrant, since the person was a juvenile and it's almost a year since the case. The officer spoke based on experience with other similar cases.
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If I did not come to identify the suspect, then the case would be dropped. The suspect would never know that he had been suspected.
The officer apologized for the delay with reviewing the surveillance footage. He clarified that he was not the officer in charge of the case and said that if it had been him, the footage would have been reviewed earlier.
I decided to not take up the option to identify the suspect in a photo lineup, thereby closing this case.