When Jennifer Abbey returned Sunday from a trip to the store in her father’s truck, she expected to see her car still parked in front of his Vancouver home.
“I just washed and waxed my car the day before, and I’m thinking I’m going to look over and see how nice it looks,” the Longview woman said of her silver 2000 Honda Civic EX, with pink-and-chrome rims and a front-end lip kit. But her car was gone.
She checked around the block, then turned, in tears, to her father. Abbey is pregnant and due soon, and inside the car were diapers, a car seat and other items for her baby.
Abbey had been working in construction, laying train railing, but has been unable to work since getting pregnant. The last of her unemployment benefits went to the baby gear, she said, leaving her no options to replace them.
She was in tears again Monday, when a Clark County sheriff’s deputy brought her more baby supplies, donated anonymously by the neighbors who found her car in Orchards on Monday.
Deputy Scott Holmes responded to the original theft call, then filed it away. He usually works on a different side of the county, and when he heard a report the next day that someone had found a stolen Honda, he took the call.
“How many silver Hondas with pink chrome rims are rolling around?” he said. “I really wanted to at least give her that phone call.”
The car had been ransacked, the steering column and stereo torn apart, and the newborn supplies were gone, as were some of Abbey’s medical paperwork.
When Holmes told the people who found the car, they asked if Holmes would join them on a trip to a nearby store. They bought Abbey a new combination car seat and stroller, diapers and other items, and they refused Holmes’ offers to pitch in.
“They said, ‘We’re just going to do it.’ It was not out of pity or guilt, it was just, ‘Hey, it’s the right thing to do,’ ” Holmes said.
Holmes later met with Abbey, and brought along the neighbors’ gifts in the trunk of his patrol car.
“And I just start bawling,” she said. “It gives me hope that while there’s bad people who will steal from you and break you down, there’s still good people out there, too.”
