March 29, 2024

Family to thief: Give us back our dad’s cremated remains

DIKE (AP) — Family members have sent a message to the person or people who burglarized a rural home in eastern Iowa: Give us back the box holding the cremated remains of our father.

The box was stolen Feb. 14 or 15 from the rural Dike home of Daniel Evanson, who was 65 when he died Feb. 6, the Waterloo-Cedar Falls Courier reported.

“We don’t care why you did it or what else you took; we want this wooden box back! This is his cremains, the last hold his daughters have!! Someone knows something,” Evanson’s sister, Dawn Brown, wrote in a public Facebook post. “Please just take him back to his farm and leave him under the bench on the deck.”

The box was decorated with a farm scene that showed a tractor and a barn. Also taken were record albums, firearms, a television and a child-size motorcycle.

“I assume they took the box thinking it was something special and didn’t know what it contained,” said Chief Deputy Kirk Dolleslager with the Grundy County Sheriff’s Office.

The break-in was one of several that have occurred recently in Grundy and Black Hawk counties that may be related, deputies said.