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Homeowner seeks fellow crime victim after thieves leave photo album behind
WATCH: An east Vancouver woman whose home was burglarized is trying to find the owner of something the thieves left behind. Tanya Beja explains – Aug 16, 2016
An East Vancouver resident is hoping the public can help solve a mystery.
When Oshy Parasol’s Strathcona neighbourhood home was broken into about a month ago, she didn’t expect to get something that did not belong to her.
Inside her home, she found two photo albums with someone else’s photos. Parasol believes they were left behind by the thieves when they rushed out of her house.
Parasol opened up the albums and became intrigued. Flipping through, she discovered personal photos predominately of an older gentleman, possibly of Mediterranean descent, a younger man with glasses, and a family of Chinese decent.
Page after page, a story unfolds revealing travels around the world, and as Parasol puts it — a life “lived to the fullest.”
“Most of these are dated with 1998. It definitely took some effort to one — have these experiences and two — to collect them and put them together.”
“Having gone through them, this older gentleman is featured throughout them and he just has a very warm and delightful appearance and presence. He’s saluting the camera in one, he’s watching flamenco dancers in another [and] sipping wine. He’s blowing out his birthday candles. You can tell that he is very loved.”
Parasol has gone about searching for the album’s rightful owners in a traditional sense. She’s scanned some of the photos and put together flyers, handing them out in Chinatown and Strathcona.
As she hands out flyers today in her neighborhood, a thought crosses her mind that the older gentleman may no longer be alive.
“I feel like he had a lot of life in him in 1998 and he could have a lot of life in him today. However, if he has passed, there are definitely people missing these photos.”
She believes there’s a strong chance the photos belong to someone in her community. That possibly the thieves had just finished robbing an area neighbour’s house before they entered hers.
In Parasol’s case, the Vancouver Police Department tracked down the robbers and returned her stolen items. She got a happy ending and now she’s hopeful this stolen album’s destiny “will have a happy ending” too.
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