“Cambodian police, baffled as to why a deaf mute man would steal a telephone, soon found their answer when a witness led them to the phone in a local pawnbroker’s shop and they then found the culprit in a nearby brothel, authorities said on Thursday. The police chief for Toul Sangke commune in Phnom Penh, Khat Darasi, said victim Ear Bunnarith, 40, reported his cellphone stolen on October 11 and named the culprit as a profoundly deaf man known only as Bun, 27. ‘But neither the police nor the victim could understand why Bun would steal a telephone, as he cannot speak or hear. He had been friends with Bunnarith for many years without doing any wrong before,’ Darasi told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa. ‘It was not until a motorbike taxi driver came forward and told us where he had taken Bun after the phone disappeared that we realised he might not be able to use a telephone, but he is human. He stole the phone to buy love.’ Darasi said the victim had declined to press charges against Bun after the phone, which he had pawned for $10, was returned, and Bun was released after promising to find more appropriate means to fund his love life in the future.” —News24.com (South Africa)

When you first read that headline, it conjures up all sorts of images. Man steals phone for sex — you imagine him suffering from some weird sort of gadget fetish that causes him to fondle phones or insert them into his private parts. Then when you read that the perp was both deaf and mute, the weird images are reinforced. Obviously he couldn’t use the phone for its intended purposes, you think, so he must have been using them for perverted ones.

The great part about the story, though, is not the solution to the mystery but rather the followup. The solution — ie that the guy pawned the phone to pay a hooker — is trivial enough. It reduces the story to petty larceny. But consider the denouement. Many people would feel shock and disappointment to learn that a long-time friend had stolen something from them, but the “victim” in this case was entirely sympathetic to his friend’s plight. So long as he got his phone back, he didn’t want to make any further issue out of it. What a different resolution to a story that could have so easily ended in bitterness and lawsuits! It practically gives the story a moral — a testament to the power of friendship, compassion, and fellow-feeling.

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