Eleven-year-old Isabel Schmitt has been drawing for as long as she can remember.
“Probably birds are the easiest,” the young artist told Global News.
Her latest Steller’s Jay is no easy feat but Isabel is always looking to up her game.
On Friday Dec. 7, her keen eye for detail paid off.
“One of my daughters came to me and said there was a sketchy looking fellow biking up and down the street,” Isabel’s father Brent Schmitt recalled.
Isabel’s older sister Allison first spotted the suspicious male cyclist circling their Abbotsford neighbourhood around 11:30 a.m.
“I noticed he kind of went back down and I thought that was weird and so then I walked over to the front hall and told my Dad,” Allison told Global News.
WATCH: What it’s like to be a police sketch artist
“We thought it was like, just a homeless guy biking on the sidewalk,” said Isabel.
“But then he just kept going back and forth and kept looking up our driveway.”
At the time, a family friend was visiting their home and had left her purse on the seat of her truck, which was parked outside.
“I see him casually try the handle on the door and he seemed to have this bit of shock when he realized it’s unlocked,” said Brent.
“Prior to him doing this he was even waving at the kids in the window so he was pretty confident in himself, right. But as I saw what he was up to, I banged on the window and quickly ran out and he was down the street.”
The suspect rode off but not before Isabel went to work with her pencils – producing an amateur sketch.
“We forget what colour his sweater was,” recalled Isabel, who decided to leave the man’s sweater colour white.
When reporting the incident to Abbotsford Police after it happened, Brent Schmitt emailed the officer on the file a photo of the sketch Isabel created.
The Abbotsford Police Department later posted the photo on social media – and thanked the artist in a tweet:
“Thank you to 11 yr old Isabel, who provided drawing of a male seen around Oakhill Dr. this afternoon attempting to break into vehicles. This suspect is described as: Male, 40 yrs, dirty bld hair (maybe have some gry), wearing black pants w/ white stripes on a bike.”
While the suspect may be sketchy, Isabel’s drawing is not. Police told Global News it contained details many witnesses don’t always provide.
“Honestly I had a hard time recalling all the details,” said Brent.
“I’m kind of guessing he’s 40-ish but I could be off on that, like, I didn’t remember that he had the black pants with the white strip or the girls noticed that he had a watch on the left arm type of thing – so all these details I don’t recall.”
“I think it’s pretty close,” said Allison.
“I noticed the bracelet on his hand because that’s the hand that he waved with.”
Far worse amateur sketches have sunk suspects. In February 2018, a very lean black and white likeness led police to identify a suspect in a farmer’s market theft in Pennsylvania.
“While the sketch provided by the witness may have appeared amateurish and cartoonish, it, along with the distinctive physical descriptors, jogged the memory of at least one investigator to provide a potential suspect name,” said Lancaster City Bureau of Police in a news release.
You don’t want to be judging people,” said Brent Schmitt on his daughter Isabel’s attention to detail.
“But at the same time you need your intuition to kick in and you gotta listen to it.”
When asked whether she might have a new career doing sketch drawings for police departments – Isabel responded, “It would kind of be fun.”
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