Moving truck full of musician's life's possessions stolen in Richmond
Credit to Author: Kevin Griffin| Date: Mon, 06 Jan 2020 00:58:59 +0000
A local musician and his wife are still in shock after someone stole their moving truck full of their life’s possessions.
Terry Russell and his wife Debbie had their 20-foot U-Haul Truck stolen from behind the Travelodge in Richmond early Saturday morning somewhere around 3 a.m.
“We’re still a little stunned,” he said.
“We’d been burglarized before. But this is a whole new level. We don’t even have receipts because they were stolen too. It’s very disorienting.”
Russell is the drummer of the Vancouver punk band Slow which was active in the mid-1980s and then organized a reunion tour in late 2017.
In a story about the return of Slow, John Mackie in The Vancouver Sun said of all the wild rock ‘n’ roll bands in Vancouver, Slow “took it to a new level” in a performance during Expo 86 that so shocked organizers that they cancelled the fair’s independent music festival.
Russell was also in the band Tankhog.
Russell and his wife moved to Los Angeles for a year as part of efforts to start a new band. When that didn’t work out, they packed the contents of a two-bedroom apartment into the truck and headed north, back home to Metro Vancouver.
The truck was stolen on the last night before Russell and his wife planned to move everything into a storage locker.
Stolen items included dishes, cutlery, a sofa, bed, TV, family photographs, a hand-painted cabinet by Randy Bachman given as a wedding gift, a collection of comic books and hockey cards, as well as two drum sets and ukuleles.
Debbie Russell is a photographer who lost several cameras as well as images on memory sticks that she had not yet uploaded.
The thief took the truck, which was towing the couple’s car. RCMP have already found the trailer with the car nearby but not the truck with all their possessions. The truck was parked in an area not monitored by security cameras.
“Obviously, whoever stole the truck knew the lay of the land and knew it was fair game,” Russell said.
The couple had contents insurance while living in Long Beach and standard protection for the truck but not for its contents while travelling.
Also stolen was their home computer with a list of serial numbers of household items.
“They took everything but the suitcases we took into our hotel room,” he said.
A GoFundMe campaign has started to raise $25,000. As of Sunday, it was at $6,140.
Russell estimates the replacement cost is about $40,000.
Russell asked whoever stole the truck to “just give us our stuff back — or at least the stuff you can’t sell, keep it dry and somewhere easy to find.”
The one silver lining so far is all the support the couple has received.
“Our friends have been very wonderful and strangers too,” he said.
“People have been very kind.”