Bad news, good news

COEUR d'ALENE - Maybe the two events cancel each other out, Terri Sande acknowledged.

That is, her gift-filled car being stolen, and her soldier son visiting unexpectedly before his overseas deployment.

But the Coeur d'Alene grandmother still feels that the holidays, and her family being together, have been tainted by the theft and then stripping down of her beloved jalopy.

"I feel violated. It's like somebody breaking into your house," Sande said.

"I've lived here pretty much my whole life, and you trust the town."

She was baffled Friday night to discover that her '91 Camry was missing from the parking lot of Washington Trust Bank, where she works.

Maybe it was the unwrapped gifts inside that had tempted the thief, she initially thought. The car itself was only functional enough to allow her to drive to work, pick up her grandchildren and ferry around an older friend she cares for, she said.

"We've always had kids in school. We've never bought a new car just because of that," explained the mother of three, all grown now.

Sande's family learned on Monday that the car had been found on Saturday at a gravel pit in Spokane, where it sat on cinder blocks with the studded snow tires and battery missing.

Something was added: The generic key the culprit had used to open and start the car.

Only some of the gifts, wind chimes, were taken, while the new men's clothing was left behind.

"I don't know why a guy would take wind chimes over clothes," Sande said.

The cost of towing and housing came to about $330, she said, not including the additional payments to repair various dents on the uninsured vehicle.

It isn't the cost that irks her, she said, so much that the car had been stolen while her family was out with her son, Brock, an Army helicopter pilot to be deployed to Afghanistan next month.

That he was there at all was something of a miracle, she said.

Stationed in Colorado Springs, Brock had been allowed to return home for the early birth of his second child.

The 22-year-old had missed his flight from Denver, she added, and had been told he would have to wait another day, missing his daughter's birth.

But the stranger behind him at the ticket counter volunteered to buy him a ticket from another airline, which would deliver him home just in time for Jaylynn Elizabeth's birth.

"When he was walking away, the man turned around and said, 'Soldier, I want to congratulate you on your new baby,'" Sande said. "There are wonderful people out there."

Not so much the person who stole her car, she said.

"Don't just take things from someone thinking you can get some cash," she said. "You're leaving those other people short handed and having to replace those items, and that's not right."

Maj. Ben Wolfinger with the Kootenai County Sheriff's Department cautioned that thieves tend to target cars with Christmas gifts in the open.

"Try to put them out of sight," he said. "That applies too to home burglaries. We see burglaries where they just go in and take Christmas gifts. Talk about the grinch."

Sande said she is grateful that she and her husband, Grant, had another car to drive when the Camry was taken.

"I know I'm not the only one talking to police officers in Spokane who had this happen," she said. "We're fortunate we can pick ourselves up from that. Some people, they're going to be walking to work."