As anyone with even the hint of an Instagram will tell you, Coachella happened this weekend. For those of you who weren’t there, you probably saw hundreds of photos in your feed of your friends wearing flower crowns and face jewels in various states of being drunk, triggering a FOMO spiral that inevitably ended in filling the void by buying a shitload of Korean beauty products on Amazon and vowing never to miss anything ever again. If you were there, you may have had your phone stolen (aka one of the greatest disasters that can befall a person), all thanks to the work of one guy.
36-year-old Reinaldo De Jesus Henao was caught at Coachella with more than one hundred stolen smartphones. A pretty despicable crime for someone with Jesus in his name. And on Easter, no less! But before you go being all impressed with this guy’s incredible phone heist, let me ask you this: Could there possibly be an easier crime than stealing 100 phones at Coachella? A crowd of drunk twenty somethings on molly screaming to EDM music is not necessarily the most attentive group when it comes to their belongings. In fact, there’s a solid chance at least half of them are tripping balls on something and made a pact with a spirit lion to shed all their Earthly possessions. Is there something easier than taking candy from a baby? Because stealing phones at Coachella is probably that easy. If this guy really wanted a challenge, he should try getting my phone out of my hand when I’m waiting for a text back from a guy. I’m not currently a black belt, but I imagine I’d become one in that moment.
So, how did the stolen phones get found? Well, as anyone who has ever left their phone in a cab and watched it cruise around the city can tell you, Find My iPhone is actually a pretty good way to find your iPhone. Apparently, Henao was located when the people who were sober enough to realize their phone had been stolen teamed up with police to activate Find My iPhone, meaning that our genius phone thief was caught because he literally forgot to turn all the stolen phones off. Wow. The collective brainpower here is honestly staggering.
Hanao apparently did the majority of his thieving on Friday night at the Sahara Tent, so if you were there on Friday and woke up Saturday covered in glitter with no phone, you may have been the victim of a phone theft. Either that, or you dropped it in the toilet. Or buried it mid-acid trip as a symbol of new beginnings. It’s hard to say, but at least 20 orphaned phones have been reunited with their phone parents, and the rest are being held by Coachella’s lost and found, so it’s worth checking out.
Sidenote—how much weed do you think is in the Coachella lost and found? A hundred pounds? A thousand? The limit does not exist.
The moral of this story is twofold: 1) don’t keep your phone sticking out of your back pocket at a music festival and 2) if you’re going to steal 100 iPhones, remember to at least turn them off. Also, don’t steal from people. It’s rude and like, not very good vibes.
