There’s a midnight water bandit at large in Lexington. One woman’s bill is proof

Insurance agent Yvette Smoak was “sticker-shocked” when she opened the most recent water bill for her Lexington agency last month, her husband Jeff said.

The bill was $300 more than usual. The agency, which only has one bathroom, had consumed more than 27,000 gallons of water in one month.

“We were just wondering what the heck was going on,” Jeff Smoak, also an insurance agent at the Allstate, said.

So he and his wife started with the obvious: call the plumber, fix the busted pipe. But there was no busted pipe or leaky connector or anything else. The reason for the bill was a late-night water bandit.

For weeks, an unidentified culprit had been pulling up to the business and pumping gallons and gallons of water for who knows what. “Maybe a pressure washing company,” Jeff says, though he doesn’t know.

At 10 p.m. or 2 a.m. or some other bizarre hour of the night, hundreds of gallons of water would be stolen.

Smoak said the Town of Lexington set up surveillance cameras to try to catch the aquatic crook and town police said they would increase patrols in the area.