Thieves steal from dead man’s workshop

Marie Gidney says thieves must have made as many as seven or eight trips with items stolen from the workshop of her husband, Loran, who died May 23.

No one was home at the time, and she believes the arrival of a visitor probably scared away thieves before they finished.

When she went into the workshop, she found her husband’s tools piled on a bench, ready to be taken away, and other items were also piled ready to be removed.

Much of the material was stored in the body of a five-ton truck, and that was pretty well cleaned out, said Gidney.

“He had been working on a three-wheel motorcycle for a year, and they even took the handlebars off that and the headlights. They were ready to take that.”

She said the thieves must have used a path from a neighboring house to approach the workshop unseen.

“To me, it’s just an invasion of privacy and sacrilege because his ashes were still out there in the shop, sitting on the bench and thank God they didn’t touch them.”

Gidney said the family is still undecided about what to do with the ashes, but “we put him there after the funeral because that’s where he’d want to be.”

An RCMP officer has told her that there have been some leads through Crime Stoppers, she added.