Idaho Falls woman’s video goes viral after backpack full of irreplaceable items is stolen
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Paul Beam, KPVI
IDAHO FALLS — A local woman’s stolen backpack caused heartbreak but now she’s using the power of the internet to get it back.
KPVI spoke with Shanté Morgan Anderson – an Idaho Falls woman whose attempt to reach a thief has gone viral.
When Shanté’s husband returned home and told her that his backpack had been stolen out of his car at the Home Depot parking lot, she followed her instincts and took to Facebook.
“I’ve connected in with this community so much and they’ve helped so many times that he got home and I stepped outside and did a quick live video and said, ‘Hey, this is what happened,'” Anderson says.
She asked the thief to return the backpack by dropping it off at Home Depot.
But it wasn’t because the contents of the bag were valuable in a monetary sense. Instead they were extremely valuable to their family.
The last few months have been rough on Shanté with the birth of her second child plus she ended up getting mental health care inpatient treatment. The backpack was filled with letters and art from her time there.
“There is this art piece and it’s the top of Everest that I painted,” Anderson says. “It was the first time that I gave myself credit for making it through something that the doctors told me I could die from. And it was a letter to my husband when I decided that we were going to be okay and we would get to stay us and a family.”
The video was posted on Monday and now has over 26 thousand views and over a thousand shares.
The reaction has been strong, with some even resonating with how candidly she talks about her time in treatment.
“I’ve had someone reach out that said that they felt like they needed to go (get help) – that they’ve been scared and they decided to because they saw the video,” she says. “Somebody else said that they’ve done their own version of inpatient treatment for other reasons and hadn’t told anyone outside their close family. When you do something like that, it’s not just an experience.”
As for the thief of the backpack, if he has seen the video she hopes he will redeem himself.
“Life gets hard. And life gets hard for everybody and we all have our own hardest days and you always have a choice,” she says. “To come back and redeem and be who you want to be versus who you feel like you were forced to be.”