Reward offered for family heirlooms stolen from Colville home
COLVILLE, Wash. — A family in Olympia is asking for the community’s help to find heirlooms stolen from their vacation home in Colville.
The Turners discovered their Alaskan bear rug, among other items were missing over the weekend when they were cleaning out the home following a family death.
“We lost dad a year ago,” Kevin Turner said over the phone Thursday evening.
Turner’s father Herb lost his battle with prostate cancer back in August 2013, he was 77. Herb was not only a loving husband, father and grandfather, he was also an avid hunter. His trophies hung on the wall of he and his wife, Mickey’s Colville vacation home.
“Mom and dad usually spent three to five months a year over there, some in the spring and some in the fall,” Turner said.
Herb and Mickey’s four kids and 20 grandchildren would make the 400-mile drive to Colville to hunt everything from turkeys to bears. However, when Herb died, it put an end to their trips. It wasn’t until just this summer that the family returned, only to clean out the place. When they most recently returned this past weekend, they found someone broke in.
“This is the door they used to gain entry,” Dave Baskin, a family friend said while pointing to the back door.
Baskin was there when Mickey discovered her husband’s trophies were missing: a 9 foot Alaskan Brown Bear rug, Caribou mount, Black Tail Deer Head mount and a Black Tail Antler mount that was shot by her father in the 1940’s.
“Losing her husband was bad enough,” Baskin said. “Now to lose these items that were irreplaceable, his things that he was going to pass on to the boys, she was really broken up about that.”
Baskin is not only close to the Turner family, his wife Cindy is the one who preserved most of their animal trophies.
“We put them on a nice plaque, they wanted all their plaques to match all the brass tags to match, all done at the same time,” Cindy Baskin said.
She said she knows just how meaningful those trophies are to the family.
“In a family that hunts, passing off those trophies is just huge,” Cindy Baskin said.
She and Dave are part of the effort to reunite the family with their heirlooms, a gesture that Turner is very thankful for.
“The whole family is thankful to the community for helping us out, it’s amazing,” Turner said.
The family said they are offering $1,000 reward for information that leads to an arrest and conviction or $2,500 for information that leads to an arrest, conviction and return of the heirlooms. Anyone with information is asked to contact the Stevens County Sheriff’s Office at 509-684-2555.
