A family’s tomatoes kept disappearing. Security footage revealed an unlikely suspect

Paula Habib and her husband, Rob Morin, grow tomatoes and strawberries in front of their house in Montreal, Canada, every year.

When the produce started disappearing this year, the couple said they had a likely suspect in mind.

“This year after many were ripe, we noticed they were going missing,” Morin told CNN. “We first thought it was the squirrels, but normally the squirrels leave a mess, and there was not a mess on the ground where the plants were.”

But after checking the security cameras out front, Habib told CTV News that the thief was much bigger than a squirrel.

It was a mailman from Canada Post, she said. It stunned Habib and her husband.

“The postman is stealing tomatoes, like what’s going on?” she told CTV. “That’s something a postman shouldn’t be doing, taking peoples tomatoes and strawberries.”

Habib said in an interview with CBC that the footage showed he did it about “every day.”

“We’d look at the camera and again it was him — picking and choosing and turning the basket round and round to pick the red ones,” she said. “He’s like really in there. We had friends that said, ‘Put out some bread and mayonnaise and salt and pepper and he can make a little sandwich.’”

According to CTV News, Canada Post said it has reached out to Habib and Morin about the incident.

Habib said that the postal carrier and a supervisor would apologize to her in person on Friday. She told CBC that she doesn’t want him to lose his job over his snacking habits — but that it’s important to set a standard of honesty and respect.

“I’ve always taught my kids not to steal, and to me it’s stealing,” she said. “It’s the postman that you’re supposed to trust.”

She also suggested that the mailman could give her family a pie or a new plant, CTV News reported.

For Morin, the problem wasn’t that the mailman ate one or two tomatoes. Instead, he said it’s just that he “took so many.”