Selfie-taker turns in lost phone

Aspen police have recovered a smartphone from a man who found it in March and began taking selfies that automatically uploaded to the owner’s email account, an officer said Friday.

The owner of the Galaxy S5 smartphone reported in late March that he’d lost the phone in Aspen while running for the bus, said Aspen police Officer Andy Atkinson. Four days after making the report, the man called police again to say that the person who found the phone was taking selfies with it, which were automatically uploading to the phone owner’s Gmail account, he said.

Atkinson tried to track down the phone using GPS but was unsuccessful. The Aspen Times published a photo of the man about two weeks ago, and he called dispatchers some time during the last week of April to say he was the person with the phone, Atkinson said.

The man told dispatchers a friend of his had seen him in the newspaper, and said that he needed to turn in the phone, he said.

A Pitkin County sheriff’s deputy picked up the phone from the man in Basalt, Atkinson said. The owner of the phone did not want to press charges against the man, he just wanted his phone back, he said.

The Carbondale man who owns the phone has not yet come to Aspen to pick it up, Atkinson said.