Update: Hicks said his vehicle was returned to him on Wednesday evening.
Local volunteer Adam Hicks had spent his day and evening putting up signs advertising the upcoming Summer Bash on Tuesday and into Wednesday when his car was stolen by thieves.
Hicks, a prominent volunteer in Regina for years, was putting up his roughly 240th sign of the day advertising the event at the corner of Lewvan Drive and 13 Avenue around 1:30 a.m. on Wednesday morning.
As he’d done the whole night, he took the sign from his blue Toyota Prius and ran to place it in the ground across the street.
“I had the key fob in my pocket, but my car runs without the key fob,” Hicks recalled. “So I heard the beeping of my car of somebody getting in it without the key, and I look back and I bolted and I could see somebody hopping in it and there was another car beside it.”
“They had hopped in and by the time I got there they had sped away down the street, and I ended up chasing them, so I chased them down a couple blocks.”
Hicks was able to get the license plate number of the other car involved, a red Audi, but investigators later told him that car was also stolen.
Hicks’ car contained all kinds of items for the event including more signage, but it also contained personal items like his laptop, phone, wallet, and more.
Hicks says his personal items can be replaced with insurance, but some of what was on his phone can’t.
“For seven years with my kids, every single Sunday I take a photo on my wall with my kids, and I’ve been tracking our progress as we grow up. I unfortunately had four months of photos from the last photo a week,” Hicks said. “Out of anything, that’s the one thing that I just… you can’t replace those photos.”
But Hicks says that tradition will continue, even with a four month gap.
For now, he’s faced with the challenge of replacing the signage for the Summer Bash, set for August 25.
The organization is a non-profit, and around 100 more signs for the bash along with around $3000 worth of other signage were in the car at the time.
“We have no funding to replace that right now,” Hicks said. “The funding that we get is all from sponsors and community members, so it’s like these people stole from the community.”
Hicks says the signs took up so much of the room in his car, that only one person could fit in. He’s hoping the thieves ditched the signs at some point, and asks anyone who might see them to contact him.
“I’m hoping they threw them out somewhere, because I assume they want other people to ride in the car,” Hicks explains. “I’m hoping, somewhere in some back alley or some ditch somewhere, there’s a bunch of signage and there’s a bunch of stuff we use for the Summer Bash events.”
Hicks suspects the thieves are experienced, but has taken part of the search himself using the one piece of his car he still has: the key fob.
“They’re smart enough to not shut off the car, because the vehicle that I have you can drive it without the key fob but as soon as you shut it off you can’t restart it,” Hicks told CTV News. “So I’ve been ripping around pushing this key fob seeing if it sets off an alarm somewhere but haven’t had any luck.”
Anyone with information on the stolen car is asked to contact Regina police or Crime Stoppers, while a GoFundMe page has been launched to help the event recover funding for new signage for next year.
