By Troy Gillard

invaluable loss

Dawe desperate for return of stolen book research

Jun 17, 2019 | 8:37 PM

It’s nothing short of a devastating loss for Michael Dawe.

The city councillor was attending a reception at the Gary W. Harris Centre Thursday evening at around 7:30 p.m. when his truck was broken into. Stolen from the truck were a jacket and laptop bag.

There was no laptop or any electronic device in the bag. But what it did contain was of immeasurable importance to Dawe.

He describes it as “half a lifetime’s worth of work” – papers, a notebook and USB drives containing master files for over a thousand newspaper articles he’s written along with research material for a book project he’s been working on.

Despite having various backups, Dawe says the theft has left a large void.

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“I’m just hoping somebody out there knows something and they can get the contents back to me,” he prays. “If they want to keep the bag and the jacket, okay. Just give me back what was inside it.”

Dawe has been grateful for the hundreds of people who’ve shared his post about his stolen items on Facebook and well as others who’ve helped him look for them.

“I’m just so deeply appreciative of people like Jason Hives, who went out with me today to do a physical search. There’s a young guy with lots of other things he could be doing and he gave up his time to help me look.”

He’ll be able to recover some of the material through online searches of his published articles. But Dawe says so much more is, for the time being, lost for good.

“It hurts,” he admits. “I’m sure that the person who swiped it thought there were electronic devices such as a laptop computer in it, but there wasn’t.”

Dawe is offering $500 for the return of the bag and its contents. He says others have also generously offered to chip in reward money as well.

Anyone with information can e-mail michael.dawe@reddeer.ca or message him on Facebook.