Kingston, Ont., resident Donna Mountenay is celebrating after learning that the two vintage guitars stolen from her garage six months ago during a break and enter have been recovered.
“It’s overwhelming,” Mountenay says. “I mean, I literally thought I would never see my dad’s guitar again. I wouldn’t see either one of them.”
It was last December that she realized someone had been in her garage, and a few months more to realize the extent of her loss.
Two vintage guitars were stolen, one belonging to her late father and the other to her husband’s late brother.
“The Regent belonged to my father. My mother had bought it for him as a birthday present back in 1969, and all of us kids learnt to play on that guitar,” she says.
“Dad treasured that guitar. So the thought of, after 53 years of it being in the family, someone else’s hands being on it was killing me.”
Her father’s 1964 Regent was so well-loved, it even held his fingerprints in the neck of the guitar.
“There’s no money you can place on memories,” says Mountenay. “And when you don’t have those people with you, it becomes all the more precious.”
Mountenay reported the break and enter to Kingston Police. Now, six months later, she’s received a long-awaited update that they’ve been found.
“Since the guitars were recovered by police, further investigation revealed that the individual that sold the instruments to the Hock Shop has since passed away,” says Kingston Police Const. Ash Gutheinz.
“So that kind of wraps the case, there won’t be any charges obviously. And the owner was just grateful to be getting them back into her possession.”
“In some small way, I felt like I let my dad down by losing it and it was killing me,” Mountenay says. “So when he (Kingston Police officer) told me he had them back, he had to sit there and listen to me crying. But, they were happy tears, happy tears.”
The guitars are now in police custody and will be back in Mountenay’s hands as soon as Tuesday night.
Comments