A Vancouver Island children's organization has offered to replace a baby girl's stolen tombstone if it is not returned.
The sixty-pound grave marker disappeared on Sunday from a garden at a rural home in Courtenay, B.C., a town 100 kilometres north of Nanaimo on Vancouver Island's east coast.
The stone is a memorial to a four-month-old infant and the family is anxious to get it back because they have a memorial planned for their daughter next week, said Constable Tammy Douglas of the Comox Valley RCMP.
"To have this happen to such an innocent child and then to have the parents go through the pain and the sorrow again is incomprehensible," said Steven Baird at Street Smart Kidz, a safety organization based in nearby Comox, B.C.
When Mr. Baird and his colleagues read about the crime at globeandmail.com, they offered to replace the tombstone if it was not returned and if the family wanted.
"It just absolutely broke our heart," he said. "We hang out with families and parents and kids so much that when something goes wrong it's ingrained in us to act."
The crime is "upsetting" said Const. Douglas, but she said she hopes that the person or people who took the tombstone didn't realize what it was. "It doesn't say on it a date of birth or date of death, so you don't know what is going through these people's minds."
The tombstone is grey, concrete and approximately 60 centimentres in diameter. A photo of the baby girl takes up nearly the entire face of the stone, said Const. Douglas.
Const. Douglas said taking the stone was technically a theft, but the main goal at this point is just to get it back.
"It's such a unique thing that we feel somebody knows something about it," she said.
The Comox Valley RCMP is asking anyone with information to contact the police or Crime Stoppers.