The mystery on the driveway. It sounds like the name of a book but it is real life drama for an elderly Ottawa couple who woke up this morning to find the entire contents of a house on their driveway. It happened in the wee hours of the morning on Parkglen Drive in Ottawa’s west end. The Pullens have absolutely no idea why all this stuff was dumped on their driveway but a little sleuthing helped at least explain who it might belong to.
Kit Pullen doesn't like to make a mountain out of a molehill but the pile of belongings in his driveway is no molehill.
“This is a mystery, a total mystery,” he says as he surveys the bags and boxes and containers of stuff.
The "mystery" started around 3 a.m. when neighbor Fred noticed a cube van back into the Pullen's driveway.
“So I got up at 4:30 and saw people moving around by the truck,” he says, “and then I saw the truck move ahead and saw two people jump in and take off and I realized there's a big pile of stuff parked here.”
Enough stuff to fill a house.
“We found electronics, there’s two TV’s, two mattresses, a vacuum,” says Kit Pullen.
Pullen's car is stuck in the garage behind this pile and he and his wife are stuck with this pile at least for now.
“As far as I’m concerned,” says Pullen, “someone probably contracted some incompetent person who got our house mixed up with something similar.”
There are some clues as to who the furniture and clothes belongs to. There’s a baby gate, indicating a child involved, along with an ice cream sign from a shop in the Kingston area and then a box full of some very personal papers.
That's when the Ottawa police became interested and sent some officers over. They are now trying to track down the names on those papers. The OPP in the meantime called Kit Pullen today, notifying them that they had pulled over a cube van last night doing an illegal U-turn on the highway.
Late this afternoon, the mystery was solved. The woman who owned the belongings thought she had rented the Pullen’s home through Kijiji. She had paid cash for the last month’s rent and had her friend, who owns a delivery company, bring all her furniture to her “new” house. She realized halfway through the move that she had been scammed and contacted her friend to return to the Pullen house to retrieve her items. It is that driver who the OPP pulled over for an illegal U-turn. The Pullens should have their driveway back to normal by the end of the evening.
