Urn containing Valley veteran's remains stolen from car

FRESNO, Calif. (KFSN) -- A North Valley family is desperate to find a stolen urn containing the ashes of a local Air Force veteran.

The tiny urn was stolen from a woman's car outside some apartments in Northeast Fresno. The victim hopes the thief was just ignorant to what they took and now she's begging for the safe return of her grandfather's remains.

The urn is all that holds the only tangible item Joy Foongkajorn has left of her late grandfather, John Nieves.

"I didn't have a father figure growing in my life and he was the close, next thing to it," Foongkajorn. "He basically raised me since I was young."

Foongkajorn only had her grandfather's remains in her possession for about a week. She was staying in Fresno for a few days before taking the urn to its special place at her home in Winton.

The urn was in her car parked outside her boyfriend's apartment complex, just across the street from Bulldog Stadium.

"I discovered that my car door was slightly open," she said. "I looked around my car, some things looked normal." But not everything was, her wallet was stolen and more importantly the urn was gone. Joy's heart sank.

"I thought to myself how would somebody not recognize that this is an urn, and if they had a heart why would they take it," she said.

John Nieves died of natural causes on Halloween. The 65-year-old had served in the Air Force for 15 years. And he called the Central Valley home for more than 30 years.

Since the theft Sunday night, Joy has been desperately searching for his remains. "I went in a lot of areas within a mile distance and I was looking through trash cans and bins, through side streets and bushes," she said.

Police and even waste management workers helped her search, with no luck. But Joy says she can't and won't give up searching. "It's like slowly eating away at me, but I'm hopeful that maybe it would just turn up somewhere, and someone would return it," Foongkajorn said.

Interestingly, police found two iPods in the back of Joy's car, left there by the thief. Investigators actually pulled finger prints from the iPods. That forensic evidence is being processed right now.

In the meantime anyone who knows anything about this stolen urn is urged to call Fresno police.