FORT WAYNE – He knew the man’s face from somewhere, but where? For a split second he couldn’t place it. He racked his brain. Where did he know that man? Where had he seen that face? Who was he?

Cary Fries was stuck.

Then it hit him.

Fries, fishing last month with his 7-year-old daughter in LaGrange County, spotted the man in an anchored pontoon boat about 60 feet away. He knew the man, for sure, but had never met him.

He existed only through photographs – digital images someone had tried to delete from a stolen camera. This is the story of a police officer, a camera, a chance encounter and a rare happy ending.

“It was pretty unusual the way it happened,” said Fries, a crime-scene technician and corporal with the Allen County Sheriff’s Department.

The story begins about 2:30 a.m. Nov. 13, when Allen County sheriff’s officers were called to a neighborhood just off Eby Road in northeast Allen County. People had been seen stealing from a parked car. Several officers responded and set up positions around the area.

A group of three people ran from police when asked to stop. While searching the area, police found a backpack in a yard near where the group was first spotted.

Inside was a portable DVD player, more than 40 CDs, a computer cable and a Sony Cyber-shot digital camera. Police suspected the items were stolen, Fries said.

Later, police pulled over a group of three people in a car leaving the neighborhood. None lived in the area, but with no evidence of wrongdoing they were let go, according to police reports.

No arrests have been made, and no charges have been filed.

When police began sifting through the bag, investigators noticed someone had apparently erased the camera’s memory card. An evidence technician, though, was able to retrieve and show Fries pictures of what looked like someone’s vacation, a wedding and a man at a lake.

“I was like, ‘That’s Pretty Lake,’ ” Fries said of the photos after they had been printed out.

Fries, brother of Sheriff Ken Fries, knew people in that area of southeast LaGrange County and sent the photos to them.

Nobody recognized the faces in the photos, though, and the prints were put into storage.

Fast-forward eight months to July 24. Fries is in a paddle boat with his daughter. He’s off duty, fishing, enjoying some time at Pretty Lake. It’s only his third time there this summer, which, he says, is “not nearly enough.”

And there’s the man in the pontoon. The face is familiar, but from where? Then it clicks.

Fries paddled up to the man, who was with his wife, and said, “This is going to sound really stupid, but … ”

He asked whether they owned a camera, a Sony Cyber-shot. Sure enough, their camera disappeared from an unlocked car the previous fall.

This past Wednesday morning, the man, who through the sheriff’s department declined to comment, came to pick up the camera that had been missing for so long. It was the only item in the bag that belonged to him. Along with it, he also retrieved 50 or 60 pictures of a vacation and a wedding – the pictures that police were able to recover.

It was the happy ending that police don’t always get to see with stolen property.

“We were able to get back about 90 (percent) to 95 percent of the pictures on that camera,” Fries said. “It’s good when you can get people’s things back to them like that.”

jeffwiehe@jg.net