This is an unbelievable
story of a young Californian man named Dave Lacey whose wrenching heart
mourning the death of his beloved wife had to bear the anguish of his camera
being stolen in a home burglary which had priceless memories of his wife’s last
moments. In the video he has described his wife as being his best friend and
the woman he loved. The story proceeds to narrate to us as to how the pictures
embedded in the camera led the cops to trace the camera to its owner-Lacey.
Erica Werdel-Lacey’s wake and funeral photos
which were snapped after her death in 2011 were contained in the stolen device.
For Dave Lacey it was “like a punch in the gut and it just didn’t seem fair”.
Dave recounts that he had tried to backup the photographs on the computer but
he just couldn’t face the memories. His wife had died at the age of 30,
fighting a ruthless battle to cancer after being wedded for two years. The couple
had been introduced at work and had dated for some years. Ultimately they got
engaged and during the wedding preparations, Erica underwent a CT scan on her
doctor’s advice when her cold like symptoms persisted. Just weeks before her
wedding, Erica was devastated to hear the diagnosis; an aggressive B-cell
non-Hodgkin lymphoma which explained the two large tumors in her chest and
behind her diaphragm. The doctor had advised Erica to drop her wedding plans
and focus on her treatment but the couple was bent upon marrying no matter what
happened. In this video, the bride is captured optimistic and cheerful and the
happy façade doesn’t betray the horror of the disease she was enduring .
The couple noticed the
cancer retreating during the first year of their marriage, but the merciless
disease advanced brutally in the second year and the cancer speedily seemed to
spread to Erica’s blood and bone marrow. Erica knew that her life span was
shorter then she had ever expected it to be and so she took up photography as a
passion in order to capture the moments of happiness in her life. The Canon
became her best friend. Dave had to say goodbye to his beloved wife in December
2011 and with Erica’s Canon he preserved her last memories of her wake and
funeral. But he couldn’t steel himself to transfer the backup on his computer
and a year later the burglars raided his house and filched the Canon along with
other valuables.
Amongst the valuables robbed was Lacey’s
computer and Lacey with the help of a tracking application in his iPhone,
traced it to an apartment located in Santa Ana. He immediately dialed the
police and detectives Paul McClaskey and Jerry Verdugo force-entered the
apartment and located the robbed computer along with a stack of raided goods
and a list of pawn shops. The detectives nabbed the thieves, and recovered some
stolen items from the pawn shop though it seemed like an insurmountable task to
return them to their owners. In the video Detective McClaskey says “ we weren’t
able to track down anything because none of the serial numbers of these items
showed up in the system as stolen”. Amongst these goods was the Canon. Fortunately
they geared up the device and it opened and within minutes of thumbing through
it, they knew it was priceless and special. The pictures of the funeral forced
them to take the steps to find the owner of the Canon but this was challenging
as they couldn’t discover any name on the photographs.
While flipping through the images, Detective
Verdugo noticed a blue house next to a beige wall in the snapshots. The blue
house was the one that was depicted in the funeral photos and the beige wall
was familiar to Detective Verdugo. The detectives had a lead. They took a drive
around the neighborhood following the hunch of Detective Verdugo and found the
same wall as was portrayed in the photos. But the blue house was missing. The
detectives got out of the car and began walking down the street. After inquiring
a bit, they soon found out that they were standing outside Lacey’s apartment.
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