Closure

Kristina & Kevin Hammer

Almost as much as I love a good obituary, I love a good Orem City Crime report. They arrive in my inbox daily, complete with photos and stories from the under-belly of our fair city. Usually it is just entertaining. Today it is personal.

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A few of you will remember the lovely red handbag given to me by my mother several years ago. You may remember that the bag, along with all its contents and a make-up bag, was stolen last May. You may also recall my mission to find out who did it. If not -- I will tell the story.

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When the credit card company call early in the morning and asked if I really did order $872.98 worth of baseball cards online, I realized that my purse was not at the bottom of the box of kid trailings I schlepped in from the car the day before. Checking the several cards I had in my bag on line we learned of close to $2000 of other charges at places like Shopco, Sprint, Albertsons and $200 in car washes at the gas station of 8th north and State St. We called the police and the card companies. Both said we wouldn't have to honor the charges and both seemed very disinterested in tracking down the lovely people who lifted my plastic. So I decided to see how far I could get on my own.

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I called the baseball card company out of Yonkers, NY and told them not to send the cards but could I please get the address to which the order was to be mailed. In a very Yonkers accent the fellow told me that he was suspicious of the order when he noticed a nice lady in Utah indicated an email address of hugejohnson4-20@yahoo.com. "I says to my wife ... It's Mother's Day and some lady in Utah is ordering $872.98 in cards with this email address? I don't think so." He gave me the an address and wished me a Happy Mother's Day and I went to stake it out.

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The house was vacant and for sale, so naturally, I called the realtor. As I took a tour of the house posing as a prospective buyer, I gathered as much information on the sly about the previous tenant as possible. The family consisted of a guy and his common-law wife who's daughter was living with them along with her husband and baby. After months of loud parties and no rent, they had been evicted just the week prior. No forwarding address was left behind, surprise. What they did leave behind were the stacks of collection notices and warrants for bounced checks. What caught my eye was the bill from the pediatric clinic for Kristina Hamer and her child, calling the baby (at least to this clinic) Crystal M. Hamer. No joke -- they told the doctor their child was named for their drug of choice.

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I wrote down all the names I had seen and turned them over to the detective at the police station. All I got back was a polite note saying all the names matched people that have a history with credit card fraud but no known address. And that was the last I heard from the police.

Last week the following crime report put faces on my adventures of Mother's Day 2006. How sad for little girl, Crystal Meth. I know that staying at Grandma's house is no safer than driving around, asleep in the back seat while Ma and Pa are again casing garages on Palisades Dr. -- my neighborhood.

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07OR41711 - BURGLARY ARRESTS - 30-year-old Kevin John Hamer and his 28-year-old wife, Kristina Ann Hamer, of Springville, packed up their 4-year-old daughter in the car 2:00 am Saturday morning and came to Orem to do some burglaries. They looked for homes with open garage doors and stole from them.

An 18-year-old Orem man had opened the garage door at his residence on Palisade Drive and gone back into the house for a moment before leaving. When he went back into the garage, he saw Kristina Hamer run from his garage and jump into the passenger side of the Pontiac sedan driven by John Hamer and speed away. The witness followed the burglars in his own vehicle down Orem's Center Street and into Provo as he called the police. The thieves made a u-turn and retraced their path back into Orem, making an obscene gesture to the witness as they turned and passed him.

Officers stopped the Hamers at 500 E. Center Street in Orem.
The Hamers were arrested for burgalry after admitted and showing officers where they had gone and what they had taken. The pair was also in possession of methamphetamine. Their 4-year-old child was turned over to a grandmother while mommy and daddy Hamer went to the Utah County jail.