NEWPORT –– When he got home after a morning ear surgery, Joshua Chiarini was exhausted and in pain.

And his day was about to turn worse.

“I walk into my apartment, I immediately go to the TV and look down at the ground,” said the Navy corpsman. “I look to my right and my laptop is missing and I remember thinking ‘I left it here this morning,’… I turn around and my neighbor walks in and says, ‘Dude, you’ve been robbed.’ ”

Missing were Chiarini’s laptop, wires, a watch, his military uniforms, DVDs and a sound system for his computer. Chiarini called the police to report the break-in, but he held out little hope that the case would be solved.

Then his neighbor, Neal LaChance, mentioned a webcam in plain sight on Chiarini’s television, reminding Chiarini that he had been using his technological toy the night before.

The previous evening, Chiarini was about to go to sleep at his home on Malbone Road when a loud noise sounded from his living room television, which was hooked up to his nearby desktop computer. He glanced at the television screen and saw that Woot TV was advertising a special event. Woot TV is a nightly live webcast that sells technological products and hosts live chatrooms.

Chiarini got up and dug his webcam out of his closet –– where it had been collecting dust for several months –– and set it up so he could participate in a Woot TV trivia game.

(A webcam is a small video camera that can be hooked up to a computer to allow the user to communicate via live video with another webcam user.)

Chiarini took part in the trivia game and then an interactive chat with several other participants before falling asleep on his couch around 5 a.m. with the webcam still running.

The camera was still on when he left about 8:30 a.m. for outpatient surgery at the Naval Health Clinic to eliminate the discomfort he feels when wearing a military helmet.

When he got home and discovered the burglary, he realized that the whole scene could have been captured by his webcam. Chiarini remembered that Woot TV saves all the video it receives.

“That’s when it hit me,” Chiarini said. “No other service ever archives video because it takes up so much space.”

Using his desktop computer, Chiarini connected with the users of Woot TV, asking if anyone had watched a live video of his apartment between the hours of 8:30 a.m. and 12:30 p.m. on June 19.

No one responded for six hours.

Then, Chiarini said, the creator of the Web site, who is known as TheWootalyzer, sent a message saying, “Hey Chowda, someone from your family is sweeping all your belongings into a garbage bag?”

“Chowda” is part of Chiarini’s online alias, a joking reference to his New England accent.The message from TheWootalyzer included a link to a video that shows a woman, dressed in a baggy T-shirt and sweatpants and sporting a yellow and black baseball cap snatching several of Chiarini’s possessions and stuffing them into trash bags.

Quickly, Chiarini called the police for the second time that day and arranged to show a video of the theft. An officer recognized the woman on the video. The next day at 9 a.m., police arrested Becky L. Fath, 49, of 245 Broadway, on a charge of breaking and entering. All the items except for a small television have been recovered. Chiarini estimated the value of all the stolen items to be more than $3,000.

Chiarini says he doesn’t know Fath, but says he found out later from mutual acquaintances that she had been asking them when Chiarini would be away from his apartment.

According to the police report, Fath said she burglarized Chiarini’s home because “he owed her money.”

“I’d never met her in my life,” Chiarini says.

It is the first time Newport police have made an arrest by using video from a personal webcam, according to Lt. William T. Fitzgerald Jr. Without the video, he says, there was little chance the stolen items would have been recovered because “the department had no suspects at the time.”

“Obviously, it’s an effective tool to have if anybody breaks into your house,” he said. “We got her in less than 24 hours … It was great police work by the detectives and the patrolmen.”

This is the second time in less than a year that Chiarini has been in the headlines. On Oct. 22, 2007, he was awarded the Silver Star, the military’s third-highest honor, for bravery while in service in Iraq last September.

Now, the arrest of a burglar has given him a face on YouTube.com, where more than 20,000 viewers have seen the recorded burglary. His video is also on PerpTurkey.com, the Web site with the tagline, “Where bad people meet good technology.”

“Overnight, I’ve become an Internet hero,” he says with a laugh.

cthompson@projo.com