Clair Kami said she was completely heartbroken by the loss
A couple who saved for nine years to be able to afford their dream had it snatched away in seconds. Clair Kami, 31, and her partner Martin Chidlow, 44, both from Huyton, bought the van earlier this year and spent thousands converting it into a camper van.
On July 11, Clair said she dropped off their pride and joy campervan at a garage in Vauxhall. The van had not passed MOT and was parked outside on the street when it was stolen at around 2.20pm.
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Clair said she doesn’t know how the thieves got away with the van so quickly because they took it without using the key. The 31-year-old said the couple had worked tirelessly to save for the van since they met nine years ago and were now “devastated”, it had been stolen along with sentimental items inside which belonged to Claire’s late mother and girlfriend.
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She told the Liverpool ECHO: “When we first got together we had nothing and we worked our way up. We spent years of our lives working to buy a van until we were financially stable. We spent about £15,000 of our hard-earned wages to buy it and now it’s been taken away from us. It’s terrible, I’m speechless, I feel like I’m fighting a losing battle at the moment, but we can hope.”
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Clair told the ECHO how she took the van for a routine MOT. She said: “For all we know someone just swooped in and took it, the keys are still in the garage, I was holding them. [the thieves] we took it quickly and we don’t know how, there is no spare key.”
Clair said that in addition to the van, there were also a number of sentimental items inside that mean “everything” to her. She added: “They’re little things, they mean everything to me, but they won’t mean anything to others.
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“Inside was a broken necklace with a locket with a photo of me and my mom, I lost her ten years ago and we took that locket with us on all our adventures so she could be there. My mom wasn’t.” well, before she passed, she was bedridden, so she couldn’t go anywhere…[the locket] was our way of taking mom with us, we took her everywhere.
“I also lost my cat in March – she was my world – she lived up to her name, she was my baby. I left her original paw print cards hanging inside the van and pictures of her hanging in the van. one of my closest friends who I lost unexpectedly to cancer six months ago, it was a long painful six month battle for her and her belongings were there.
“It was all little things that mean nothing to someone else, but everything to me. There was a baby Yoda ornament that was hers that she gave me; a knitted heart – it was divided into two parts, one part went into the coffin with my friend and one was with me – they are the smallest things that are of no value to anyone, but to me they are everything.”
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She added: “The van is so important to us. We’ve only had it for a few months and we’ve already done so much to make it feel like home on wheels. It’s absolutely heartbreaking, it’s just been a terrible year.
“We have it [the van] to get that sense of freedom and get away from everything and the hardships that were going on, we spent nine years together picking up pieces of past relationships and financial struggles and finally got to the point where we could start a relationship and make things work for us. This van was our start.
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“It was always a release every time we were in the van, it was the only time I could relax in it. I feel like I was robbed of my own freedom. The van itself was metal, but the meaning behind it and the stuff in it was everything we went through over the years and it ended up being the one good thing we had.”
The couple had planned to go to Scotland in a motorhome to do the North Coast 500. Clair added: “It hurts that we’re about £15,000 out of pocket now. I feel broken, absolutely broken after all this has happened. ” I think this is the straw that broke the camel’s back, the only good thing we had.
A spokesman for Merseyside Police said: “We can confirm that we received a report of a stolen Citroen van in Liverpool at around 2.20pm on Thursday 11 July. The incident is under investigation and if you have any information please get in touch by calling 101 or DM @MerPolCC quoting reference number 24000609488.”