cancer

Porch Thieves Make Off With $10,000 Chemotherapy Pills

Garland police are looking for two men they say stole a package off a home's porch containing chemotherapy medication worth nearly $10,000.

It's medicine Lewis Brown takes daily to battle the kidney cancer he was diagnosed with three years ago.

"It doesn't cure the cancer, but it keeps it from growing. I'm on it for the rest of my life or until they cure the cancer," Brown said.

His insurance company requires that the pills be delivered directly to his door every two weeks. He said he's never had a problem receiving it, until he came home to an empty porch Tuesday.

"I was surprised. I thought maybe FedEx maybe just didn't get around to it," Brown said.

But his security cameras showed a different story, revealing two men approaching his home around dinner time Tuesday evening.

First, a man wearing a badge and carrying a clipboard appears to approach the door, knock and leave empty handed. Then a second follows, snatching the package, labeled with a pharmaceutical company's name, in just seconds.

"We were violated. It's a violation and it's his medication and it's something he needs to live," Brown's wife Kelly Etgen Brown said.

Etgen Brown said she imagined the worst, fearing they'd be forced to jump through several hoops to get a replacement.

"These drugs are worth a lot of money. You can't put a value on someone's life, but it's more than we could afford to pay if we had to pay out of pocket," Etgen Brown said.

Thankfully for the Browns, the insurance company covered the replacement, which it had in the mail just a day later.

They've changed deliveries to always require a signature, and they hope others will learn what they had to the hard way.

Garland police say those responsible face felony charges.

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