Chilliwack woman heartbroken after late fiance’s T-shirts stolen

CHILLIWACK (NEWS 1130) – To anyone else, they’re worthless. To her, they mean the whole world.

A Chilliwack woman — who’s still grieving the recent death of her fiance — is now mourning the loss of a different kind after her late fiance’s T-shirts, meant for a memorial blanket, were stolen over the weekend.

“I don’t understand why somebody would want old T-shirts,” Lori Roberts said through tears. “It makes no sense to me why you’d steal that out of a car.”

Roberts says her fiance, Ron Phippen, who suddenly died last month from skin cancer just days after being diagnosed and after weeks of being sick, loved the T-shirts.

It’s the reason they were some of the only things she kept of his, as she gave almost everything else to his daughters.

“The shirts were like a big part of us because we went to lots of places together and he was a big T-shirt collector,” adds Roberts. “It’s just all the shirts have some sort of personal meaning, you know, whether we went to a market to pick it out together or whether we took a road trip.”

Her most favourite stolen T-shirt was the one Phippen was wearing when he met Roberts four years ago.

“It’s just crappy cause it’s only been just a month since he passed away,” she said. “I was starting to make a little bit of progress… that just took me right back, right back to the beginning.”

The T-shirts were stolen from the back of a friend’s car at Mount Thom in Chilliwack on Sunday.

Roberts says the friend had offered to make the memorial blanket and had the shirts in the car while on a run because she was planning to get fabric for the blanket after.

“The worst part was she was not worried about her car. She was worried about telling me about the shirts,” Roberts adds. “And that blows me away. That this girl was gonna selfishly make this thing for me, for free, just to be nice and the car gets smashed and she’s not worried about her car, she’s worried about telling me.”

While Roberts made a widely-shared Facebook post in hopes of finding the shirts, so far no one has reached out to say they have them.

“I’m hoping I get them back but I’m losing faith,” she adds. “It’s not just hurt me, but it’s really hurt his family too because everybody knows how much he loved collecting t-shirts and it’s jsut hard on all of us, like, we’ve been through enough.”