In Police District 3, southeast Denver, 14 thefts have been reported since Jan. 1, and police said they suspect there are many that haven’t been reported.

“This is a crime of opportunity,” said Denver Police Cmdr. Joe Montoya. “There could be a group of people responsible for a series of them, but I don’t think they’re all connected.”

Montoya said the thieves may be following delivery trucks or walking or driving through neighborhoods looking for packages.

One Denver homeowner, who only wished to be identified as Bill, caught one thief on a surveillance camera stealing $200 worth of photography equipment from his front porch in southeast Denver.

“I had known there was a package coming from UPS, so I waited the whole morning for it,” said Bill. “We started getting hungry, and we were gone for exactly an hour for lunch.”

That was long enough, he said, for UPS to drop off the package and the thief to pick it up and walk away — all caught on camera.

“People say when someone breaks in you feel violated. I felt the same way,” said Bill, who has since added another security camera so if the thief comes by again, there will be a better view of his face.

Police said they do not think the recent cases are connected to our story about porch-package thief caught on camera earlier this month, who was identified by a 7NEWS viewer. 

7NEWSVIDEO

Westbound traffic on Bolsa Avenue was blocked for about two hours as firefighters checked whether something inside the truck caused the driver to feel sick. At about 11:30 a.m., fire officials determined there were no hazards inside the truck, said Capt. Steve Concialdi of the Orange County Fire Authority.

Orange County Register

The researchers at the Sleep Research Centre in Surrey found that being awake causes a high scale, speed and severity of damage in body.

They followed 22 people as their body was shifted from a normal pattern to that of a night-shift worker.

The body analysis of participants uncovered a link between the night shift work and higher rates of type 2 diabetes, heart attacks and cancer, according to the study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The night work disrupts the human body’s natural clock that has its own rhythm, tuned to sleep at night and be active during the day.

“Blood tests indicated that normally 6% of genes with the instructions contained in DNA were precisely timed to be more or less active at specific times of the day.”

The recent study demonstrated that the genetic fine-tuning was damaged in the volunteers who were working through the night.

“Over 97% of rhythmic genes become out of sync with mistimed sleep and this really explains why we feel so bad during jet lag, or if we have to work irregular shifts,” said one of the researchers at the University of Surrey, Dr Simon Archer.

“Every tissue in the body had its own daily rhythm, but with shifts that was lost with the heart running to a different time to the kidneys running to a different time to the brain,” explained the fellow researcher Prof Derk-Jan Dijk.

Negative side effects often show up after several years of shift work. These changes in rhythmic patterns of gene expression are likely to be related to some of those long-term health consequences, he elaborated.

An earlier study carried out by the Danish Cancer Society also unraveled that night shift woman workers were threatened by a 40 percent higher risk of breast cancer compared with peers who worked days.

According to the California Highway Patrol, the accident happened around 9:20 a.m. in the fast lane on southbound I-15, south of West Bernardo Road.

CHP officials said the vehicle tipped over and landed on the driver’s side, blocking the traffic lane.

The UPS driver’s boss spoke with NBC 7 at the scene and said the truck blew a tire, causing the female driver to lose control of the vehicle. She was not injured in the crash, her boss said.

She was able to get out of the vehicle and into a tow truck following the crash. No other cars were involved and no one else was injured.

The shepherd-lab mix in question, Merlin, has one blue eye, one brown eye and his owner says he’s a sucker for a good back scratch.

“That’s his favorite thing,” said Lee Wilson, Merlin’s owner.

But, a run-in with a UPS driver last Wednesday has Wilson demanding answers. According to Wilson, the driver kicked his dog in the throat after the driver said the dog lunged at him. 

“He did not charge after the UPS guy, nor did he charge after his truck,” Wilson said. 

Wilson said Merlin simply barked at the driver when he came to the door. That’s when Wilson claims the driver kicked Merlin. 

“No warning, no nothing. He just simply kicked Merlin in the throat. Do UPS workers really have the right to kick your animal?” said Wilson.

Wilson said he wants a sincere apology from UPS and to make sure it doesn’t happen again to any other dog in the neighborhood.

“I do not believe in animal abuse. The truth is, I don’t buy his [the delivery driver’s] story,” Wilson said.

“I’m sorry to hear about the purported incident involving our driver and a customer’s dog,” said Dan McMackin, spokesman with UPS in an email to KGW. 

McMackin said he would have the local operations manager reach out to Wilson to discuss what happened. 

“As far as our drivers’ safety related to dog bites, we instruct our drivers to follow some common-sense but key measures when approached by dogs. One of those measures is obviously to defend themselves as best they can if being attacked, and to try to avoid an attack in the first place if possible,” McMackin added.

Wilson’s neighbor, Jim Cloke, lives a few houses down and said he doesn’t blame the UPS driver one bit. 

“No matter who stops there the first thing that dog does when the door opens is the dog comes out and lunges at you,” Cloke said. “If I were a UPS driver, they would just have to come and pick up [their packages] and that’s all there is to it.”

Other neighbors, like dog owner Rachel Crowe, said it’s a case-by-case basis.

“If a dog lunged at me, of course I would defend myself, but if it didn’t lunge at me, well then, I would be mad. I would be really mad,” she said.

McMackin added that UPS asks its customers to keep pets under control when drivers make deliveries to “try and avoid the situation to begin with.”

On Monday night, UPS said the driver, who is also a dog owner, wants to have a meet-and-greet with Merlin so a similar incident doesn’t happen again. 

by Erica Heartquist, KGW Reporter