A Colorado Rivian owner was wrongly accused of stealing a package. Her truck's data cleared her name.
If you needed a reason to care about drive tracking beyond the stats and trip logs, here it is: a Rivian owner in the Denver metro area was falsely accused of being a porch pirate, handed a court summons at her own front door, and had to spend weeks proving her own innocence. Her Rivian helped clear her name.
What happened
In late September 2025, a package was stolen from a porch in Bow Mar, Colorado — a tiny suburb near Littleton. The town uses Flock Safety cameras, an AI-powered license plate reader network that tracks vehicles entering and leaving town. The system flagged Chrisanna Elser's forest green Rivian as having driven through Bow Mar on the day of the theft.
Five days later, Sgt. Jamie Milliman of the Columbine Valley Police Department showed up at Elser's home in Denver with a summons for petty theft. He told her he was certain she was guilty. He claimed he had video proof. When she asked to see it, he refused — telling her she could see it in court. When she offered to show him footage from her Rivian's cameras to prove her innocence, he told her to bring it to court too.
The entire doorstep confrontation was captured on Elser's Ring doorbell camera. You can find the full encounter covered by CBS Colorado, The Colorado Sun, and 9NEWS.
The evidence that cleared her
Here's the thing: Elser had driven through Bow Mar that day. She was going to her tailor for a noon fitting — about a quarter mile from where the package was stolen. But she never stopped at the theft location, and she looked nothing like the person in the victim's doorbell camera footage.
Over the following weeks, Elser had to build her own case. She compiled:
- Rivian dashcam footage showing her driving through Bow Mar twice without stopping
- Surveillance footage from her tailor confirming her arrival and departure
- Google Timeline data from her phone showing her route and stops
- A photo of her outfit to compare against the actual suspect caught on the victim's doorbell camera
After weeks of calling, emailing, and even physically showing up at the police station, the Columbine Valley police chief finally reviewed her evidence, dropped the summons, and replied with "nicely done btw." The officer involved was later slated for disciplinary action.
Rivian owners have a unique advantage here, if they know how to utilize it
This story worked out because Elser was resourceful, persistent, and happened to own a vehicle with onboard cameras. But think about what she had to do: spend weeks collecting evidence from multiple sources, compiling timelines, and fighting to get anyone at the police department to even look at it.
The Flock camera system is expanding rapidly, with over 8,000 cameras across the U.S. and growing. If your vehicle gets flagged for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, as Elser told CBS Colorado: "Now it's about proving where you are and what you're doing, instead of fighting crime."
Drive tracking works for you
RiviMate's drive tracking isn't just for looking back at fun road trips or checking your efficiency. We receive telemetry for your vehicle every few seconds - speed, location, heading, anything during a drive that the Rivian API reports, we store. This gives you rich drive tracking data. In Elser's case, it would have shown her drive, the location and speed at any given point of the drive.
We built drive tracking because we think your vehicle data belongs to you and should be useful to you. Most of the time, that means checking your trip efficiency or seeing how far you drove last month. But sometimes, it might mean having a verifiable record that proves you were exactly where you said you were.