Meet Kenneth Schmidgall, 26, of San Diego, California.
This handsome, young, construction worker was chilling at a reggae concert on December 28th, when his iPhone happened to disappear.
Schmidgall repeatedly called his phone over and over again to no avail, so two days later, he and his friend Greg Torkelson decided to install an app called ‘Find My iPhone’ to track down the device using GPS.
They spent hours tracking the phone’s signal and activity until they was able to find it with pinpoint accuracy.
They found that the iPhone was with a gentleman that just happened to be biking through a neighborhood.
They pulled over to talk to the man but the man avoided them and ran to hide on a university’s campus.
Torkelson had the hand-held camera rolling, as they followed the man, losing him three times before they eventually caught up with him at the Torrey Pines State Reserve.
Once Schmidgall caught up with the man, Schmidgall is seen taking a hit to the face.
And that’s when all hell breaks out.
The two continued to fight for 18 minutes – pushing and trying to knock the other to the ground – until Torkelson said he pepper-sprayed the man and attempted make a citizen’s arrest.
An off-duty police officer then approached the men and pinned him on the ground until authorities arrived and took him away.
The video also shows him handing over the iPhone.
‘We just wanted the phone back,’ Torkelson, a photographer, said. ‘Some of it was a little bit of adrenaline… you know, it was the chase of trying to get the guy.’
Schmidgall suffered a cut lip and a few scratches, but the thief was a little worse for wear.
When asked if an iPhone was worth getting injured, Schmidgall said: ‘It’s not the phone that’s so much important. It’s that people get away with this kind of stuff all the time with cellphones being stolen.
‘I do think I taught him his lesson. I really don’t think people should be going out and getting in fights with people because of their cellphones but there comes a point when you have to stand up for yourself and say, “This is my stuff, and I’m not going to let people get away with taking it”.’
No news on what happened to the thief as of yet.
Read more here.