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Thief Steals Phone from Wheelchair & Takes Off. Woman Working Nearby Won't Have It

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Donna Ogilvie and her husband were visiting Waikiki, Hawaii when a local saw that the wheelchair-bound woman might make an easy victim. He had his eyes on the cell phone in Ogilvie’s husband’s wheelchair.

“He saw the cell phone, he grabbed the cell phone and looked at me and smiled and I said ‘stop put it back’ and he just kind of grinned and took off across the street,” Ogilvie told KHON2. She yelled at him to stop, but couldn’t do much on her own from her wheelchair.

Crystal Palacios, standing outside her work, heard Ogilivie’s cries and moved to see what was wrong.



She saw the man with the phone and decided this wasn’t going to happen on her watch.

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“He was the one with the phone and I saw her and I was like ‘I got you’ and pretty much he came up and I was like ‘give me the phone,'” Palacios recalled. “And he was like ‘try and make me give it to you’ or something like that.”

“She grabbed him by the shirt and he stumbled and because he was wearing flip-flops, he lost his sandal and dropped the phone,” Ogilvie told reporters. “Another man actually took him down.”

Jenna Lee Mauro, a local photographer, saw the ordeal and took a picture. “I saw this beautiful, powerful woman storming across the street and all traffic stopped and she had a cell phone in her hand and she’s like ‘here you go,'” she said.



“It was just so incredible, I couldn’t believe it so I just had to take a photo of it because I was just blown away,” Mauro continued.

“I mean first of all she’s in a dress and wedge heels and she chased the guy down.”

Mauro posted the photo on the Stolen Stuff Hawaii Facebook page and it received a lot of local attention. Commenters started referring to Palacios as “The Hero in the Floral Dress.”

“My friends come up to me and they’re like ‘you’re famous, you’re famous on Facebook’ and I’m like ‘what do you mean?'” Palacios said. “I’m at work right now, I’m didn’t even look at my phone.”



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Eventually, the news tracked them down and they reunited over their shared experience. “I just want to thank the folks that really stepped up,” Ogilvie said when they met.

“Sometimes stepping up and trying to help somebody puts you in harm’s way and so we were most appreciative of that,” she continued.

When asked, Palacios said she helped simply because it was the right thing to do.

“It was very, very important especially with a lot of things that’s been happening in my hometown down on the North Shore,” Palacios said.

“When I think of those kind of things it makes me think there’s so many people, all of us, why can’t at least some of us step in and do the right thing you know?”

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