Woman shares cautionary tale after home break-in while out of town
One woman is warning other St. John's residents after her home was ransacked during a few days she spent out of town.
Bev Brace returned home Monday afternoon to find her front door unlocked and her house torn apart.
She had been away for three days and swears she locked her doors before leaving, just as she had done countless times before. But as Brace entered her home through the front door she was met with a container of expired medication — not where she expected to find it.
"Leftover prescriptions that I actually had in my kitchen cupboard, in like a shoe box, Rubbermaid container," Brace told CBC Radio's St. John's Morning Show of the find.
"But they were in my porch. And I thought 'well, I didn't do that' and I took the turn to my living room, and I have a liquor cabinet in my living room, and there was bottles of liquor all over my living room."
From there Brace immediately realized that someone had been in her house while she was away, without an invitation.
'It just got worse from there'
Unfortunately for Brace, the unwanted discoveries didn't end in the living room.
"It just got worse from there," she said.
"I walked into my kitchen, every cupboard was opened … My passport was on the counter out of its package. There were wallets I haven't used in years, that they had found in cupboards, that were strewn all over the place."
That's when things took a personal turn.
"I knew that I had quite a substantial collection of jewlery that I had been collecting since I was a very young child. My mother started putting jewlery in my toe of my stocking as a little girl," she said.
"Sometimes they were $25 rings, but they had sentimental value."
Later on her pieces got more expensive and came from places all over the world, such as a 24-karat-gold and ruby bracelet Brace had bought in Nepal for her mother's 90th birthday. Her intention was to keep the bracelet in the family for generations moving forward.
Brace walked upstairs to her walk-in closet and peered inside to find her hiding place for her collection ransacked. Some jewlery was left behind on the floor and in the drawer, but a substantial amount was missing.
Twenty-three rings are gone, along with about 16 bangle bracelets.
Feeling overwhelmed and sick, she said, Brace did a quick check of her home office.
"A file had been taken out and opened. Everything I owned financially was listed there," she said.
"It was just opened to a page that you could just know everything about me … It was just personal, private and a total invasion of your home. It's just terrible."
She then returned downstairs and phoned the police.
Her own ladder used in robbery
The police confirmed to Brace that her own ladder, which was outside her home, was used to climb up to her second story en-suite and bedroom window, where the screen was cut to access the home. Her home alarm system's batteries had died some time before the theft, and her surveillance camera was facing the wrong way.
After completing an inventory of items lost, Brace started feeling uneasy in her home. Spots of blood belonging to the burglar were found on her bed, likely because they had cut themselves climbing through the wedged-open window.
She's now warning residents to be cautious to avoid going through the same thing themselves.
"You get relaxed. We're in a lovely city that you usually feel fairly safe in. We're lucky to be here," she said.
"But these things are a reality now in St. John's and we have to be a little bit more diligent in how we handle our affairs."
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