A family on holiday from the Northern Territory had a lucky break after they lost their camera on April 28 at a Cairns Shopping Centre.
A Manunda woman found the camera in the shopping centre toilets and handed it into the Cairns Central Police Beat office.
Police conducted a number of checks on our database in an effort to locate the owners to no avail so the property ended up in our Cairns Property Office.
As it turned out the owners were on their way to the airport for a three week overseas holiday when they lost the camera and they weren’t in a position to report it to police.
Property Officer Tina Casey picked up the camera and started her own search on serial and model numbers but had no luck either.
Not happy with that, she checked the images on the camera for a clue.
Whilst nothing really popped out to identify the owners, it was obvious that the owner of the camera had a fantastic holiday with their young family.
Tina persisted and with a bit of ‘detective’ work, she recognised a building in the background of a holiday snap and managed to locate a potential holiday home.
More checks identified a potential owner. After a few more calls, Tina managed to track down the owner and has since returned the property to the very grateful family.
This is not the first property Tina has gone above and beyond to locate owners for property that hadn’t been reported to police.
Some of the items she’s returned to owners have included a wedding photo album, french horn, motorised wheelchair, engagement ring and another camera.
All items took a great deal of extra work to identify possible owners and all but two items had not been reported to police.
“It makes it difficult to return property items to owners when we don’t have serial numbers or descriptions to go by. What’s even more difficult is when the property is not reported at all,” Tina said.
“I’m just doing my job and love being able to return property to their rightful owners. If it means digging through a camera’s memory card, checking engraved dates on a wedding band against births, deaths and marriage records, or making calls, we’re prepared to do it.”
To help us return property to the rightful owners, we require identifying particulars such as serial and model numbers, photos, detailed descriptions or receipts but more importantly we need our members of the community to report their lost or stolen items to us.
It’s as simple as calling policelink on ph: 131444
It just goes to show it pays to report your lost property to police.
Anyone with information which could assist police with their investigations should contact Crime Stoppers anonymously via 1800 333 000 or crimestoppers.com.au 24hrs a day.
It’s FREE to call Crime Stoppers on 1800 333 000 from any phone, including pre-paid mobile phones.
Crime Stoppers is a charitable community volunteer organisation working in partnership with the Queensland Police Service.
For all non-urgent police reporting or general police inquiries contact Policelink on 131 444.