Liz Morris is feeling hopeless and very desperate.
Her only glimmer, and it’s faint at that, is somehow the person who swiped her new Samsung S10 Galaxy phone on Friday night from The Bitter End on Argyle Street hasn’t wiped it clean.
She doesn’t care about the phone. Keep it. She just wants the photos of the last three months of her mother’s life that don’t exist anywhere else.
“I just want my pictures and videos back. I just don’t know how I’ll ever forgive myself for this. My mom was my best friend in the world, we were very, very close and I stayed with her 24/7 those last three months and they took all I have left of her.”
Scene of the crime
On Friday night, Morris left her home in Middle Sackville and drove to her friend’s house in downtown Halifax. They walked to the Bitter End on Argyle Street for a few drinks.
A phone tracking app shows her arriving at the Bitter End at 11:07 p.m.
Morris noticed it was missing at around 1 a.m. Morris and her friends searched the place before they left.
“We searched the bar, everywhere and the staff says no phone has been turned in.”
For the next hour and a half, they called the phone constantly but it just rang and rang.
“I thought it’s got to be in a seat cushion, it’s in that bar somewhere. I still didn’t believe that someone would steal it and I didn’t think someone could get into it without my password.”
Once she realized someone must have taken it, she found out something awful: there is a way to hack into the phone and run a factory reset. Wiping all data, and photos, clean.
She discovered through a tracking app her phone left the Bitter End after she did. “The phone had already been stolen at that point when we were already asking everyone, asking the staff searching everywhere. Someone had already taken it.”
It shows her phone travelled (walking) from the Bitter End at 1:39 a.m., cuts across a field of grass, then it was near the Freak Lunchbox on Barrington Street at 1:47 a.m.
“It walks for eight minutes and then boom. The phone is just (gone).”
She said her phone company told her one of four things happened at that point: The phone powered off, the battery died, the thief took the SIM card out or hacked it and reset it.
For most, a stolen phone is a financial hit, an inconvenience and a short-term worry. For Morris, it’s heartbreak.
In tears, she said: “I’m just lost. My hope has just gone now.”
Last months with her mom, gone
Her mother Nancy Georgina was diagnosed with cancer in Sept. 2019, around the same time Morris bought her new phone. Her mother died on January 13 at age 70.
Morris’ photos were backing up into Google Photos and the cloud for years so she assumed, when her phone was stolen, she could still access her photos. She had paid for extra cloud storage space but her photos for the last 13 months were not being backed up.
Morris searched everything and can’t find any photos later that Sept. 2019. That means photos from the few months of her mother’s life could be gone forever.
“Those three months with photos and video of her, they were so personal because she was dying of pancreatic cancer and she was wasting away, I couldn’t bear to share those online, they were just too personal. I didn’t post them anywhere, I didn’t even show a lot of people or my own family a lot of it,” she said. “Those pictures of me and my mom, now they’re gone forever.”
She’s tried everything. She made a Facebook post with a photo of her and her mom as the lock screen urging anyone with information to step forward. She’s asked to see the security tapes at the Bitter End but they told her the camera wasn’t working. Morris also contacted a bar across the street in hopes of looking through their security tapes. She filed a police report on Saturday and the phone has been blacklisted.
“I don’t know if there’s anything else I can do. I’m so lost now.”
Her only hope is that someone reads her story, hasn’t wiped the phone and returns it.
“I couldn’t care less about the phone, it’s about $1,000 value. I couldn’t care less. I would pay $10,000 to get that phone back. I just want my memories.”
Through the tracking app, she was able to access the lock screen on her phone (a photo of Morris and her mother) and she was able to write a message: “This phone is stolen. It contains all the photos of my deceased mother, please, please return.”
But since the phone has been missing for days, she thinks the chances of ever seeing those photos again are fading to black.
