Thomas Rice’s pickup truck – credit, released by the family.

A man who visited Syracuse, North Carolina had his pickup truck stolen—along with his father’s ashes still lodged under the back seat.

Mr. Tom Rice had driven into town for his nephew’s wedding, and parked his blue Ford F-150 SuperCrew in a garage adjacent to the Courtyard Marriot on Fayette Street.

It was a beautiful mid-fall evening, and Rice, accompanied by his golden retriever Marshall, thought he’d walk the necessary blocks to the venue rather than drive.

After a night of fun and celebration, Rice woke up to a disaster—his truck was simply gone, along with his father’s ashes.

“I walked out and it was gone. I came in just to make sure it had [sic] been towed for some reason, and nobody knew anything, and I called 911,” Rice told WSYR, Channel 9.

His father had died on October 9th, nine days prior to the wedding. Rice had just been up to Connecticut where his father lived to retrieve the ashes before driving down to NC. He said that there was a space under the back seat where the box containing them fit perfectly, with no chance of them jostling around.

“It just hit me that everything was gone,” Rice said, adding that there were also Christmas presents and other memorabilia of his father’s. “My mom’s interred at the church down in North Carolina in a columbarium. That’s where dad is going to be interred, or was going to be interred. So we want to get those ashes back in any way we could.”

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Fortunately, the truck was found over that weekend—abandoned on Onondaga Street in Syracuse. Either for reasons of decency or because they realized they weren’t of value, the thieves, who despite ransacking the contents of the truck, left the ashes behind along with many of his father’s other effects including his documents, and scale models of some of the planes he worked on as an engineer at Northrup Grumman.

Now that the ashes are recovered, Rice’s family plans to have his father’s service in November.

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“We’ve got some pretty interesting stuff for his eulogy about all of these fantastic things he did in his life, all of these adventures,” Syracuse.com. “And even after he passed away, he had one more adventure in store.”

WATCH the story below from Local Syr Channel 9 News… 

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