Police Chief Insists “Delco Pooper” Video Is Not a Fake
Rumors started swirling on Thursday that footage of the fecal incident is not as it seems. Investigators beg to differ.
Prospect Park police chief Dave Madonna / Woman seen in Delco Pooper video
UPDATE 5/1 4:45pm: Police say the Delco Pooper is this 42-year-old Ridley Park resident, who has been charged with several offenses.
It’s been less than 24 hours since the Delco Pooper became a thing. If you have no idea what I’m talking about, you can either give this a quick look, or I can just quickly summarize. On Tuesday in the Prospect Park section of Delco, in the midst of a road rage incident, a woman appeared to, well, poop on the hood of a car before walking away all smiles, a look of pride on her face. This was caught on video. Police are involved. But this being 2025, there are, naturally, conspiracy theories.
These conspiracy theories have one thing in common: they claim that the Delco Pooper video is a fake. (I should point out that the Delco Pooper is also known as the Delco Defecator and the Ridley Ripper, Ridley being the town next to Prospect Park.)
I’ve read all of these theories, and they boil down thusly.
First, some people believe that the Delco Pooper video was digitally manipulated to make it look like someone left poop on the hood of the car when all they did was actually walk by the car. In this era of artificial intelligence, deepfakes, et cetera, it’s easy for the world to believe there was not actually poop involved in the Delco Pooper incident.
Second, others are saying that this video isn’t from Delco or from earlier this week at all. That it is just some random video that someone found in some dark corner of the internet, and posted in a Delco neighborhood group claiming that it happened in Delco when it did not.
Third, some believe that the Delco Pooper simply threw something or, well, dumped something on the car that just looked gross. One of these conspiracy theorists said that “you can see her holding something in her hands” while another argued that if she took a dump on the hood of the car, there would be visible poop on her clothing as she walked away.
Finally, the most popular theory seems to be that the entire Delco Pooper incident was staged. The Delco Pooper herself was in cahoots with the people filming from the car. One person noted that she obviously smiles at the camera after walking away from the car. What if this were, say, some idiot on TikTok who wanted to get a bunch of followers, so she called her friends to all create this scene. Maybe the woman in the car that gets “pooped on” is her Aunt Edna? And the guys in the car are her brothers?
The cops say that all of this is utter nonsense. According to police familiar with the case, they have identified all of the individuals involved, and it is beyond clear to them that the people in these three cars had nothing to do with each other and that the Delco Pooper was a, shall we say, lone wolf.
As for the idea that the video was digitally manipulated or that the Delco Pooper merely poured some liquid on the car and did not actually poop on it, for the answer to this question, I reached out to Prospect Park police chief Dave Madonna.
“This, unfortunately, is a real incident,” Madonna tells me. “It is not staged and it is, in fact, excrement from a human person. I wish it wasn’t true. But it is.”
Police continue their investigation into this crappy situation.
