A break-in has stripped a Tri-City family of the memories of some precious moments.
Laura Lomax said she and her husband went to their son's home in northeast Coquitlam on Sunday to water the garden and check on the place while he's on vacation.
"I thought, boy, it looks kind of ransacked but I didn't think much of it," she said. "Then I looked over to where the big-screen TV is and it was just a white wall.
"I started screaming for my husband because I'm still in there by myself and I don't know if someone's still in there."
Lomax said thieves had torn through the inside of the home, making off with numerous valuables.
"But the main thing that's missing is his camera."
It's not so much the camera, she said, but the images it contained on its memory card. Those include her grandson's birth, father-in-law's 88th birthday celebration and numerous family vacations. "There's wedding photos that haven't even been printed out yet to make the photo album just so many memories," Lomax said. "It's devastating. We don't care about anything else. We don't care about any of the material things."
She said the break-in took place sometime between last Friday afternoon and 1 p.m. Sunday. She estimates there were thousands of images on the camera, taken over the past five years, and the family never burned any of the images onto a computer - "We're kicking ourselves now," she said.
Lomax said she and her husband previously noticed a strange man outside her son's home and now suspect he had been casing the place but catching the suspect in the theft isn't their priority, it's getting back the images contained on the camera's memory card.
She said those can be turned over to police or dropped in the home's mailbox, "No questions asked."
