Help Origami Button recover from van theft

Hi everyone, my name’s Matt and I play drums for the band Origami Button. On August 6, we bought a new van in the middle of a full US tour with Hail the Sun after constant breakdowns and bouts of maintenance with our old one as it was unable to handle the rigors of the road. This set us back financially but with a van that worked and much of the tour still yet to be completed, we were confident that we would be able to pay back our investment.

Less than a week later, on August 12th, our van was stolen in Portland OR. After telling us we could park in the venue lot, the venue that we played that evening told us to move down the street to an empty church parking lot instead, where our passenger window was smashed, the van hot wired, and driven away along with our U-haul trailer.

After several completely failed attempts to get any police involved, we were able to trace our van’s location via an AirTag that we had in it and confronted the thieves, and recovered the van. However, the U-haul was unattached from it and is still missing, and four of us had suitcases with all our clothes and many personal belongings stolen. In addition, the Uhaul held almost all of our merch that we had just ordered, probably close to if not more than $10,000 worth. We will also need to get the window and door to the van fixed, as well as other minor repairs from damage done by the thieves, as well as any costs incurred from the stolen Uhaul.

The tour is continuing on as scheduled but we are operating under the assumption we are never seeing the merch again. We absolutely hate doing this: we could financially weather just purchasing the van or maybe even the merch getting stolen. But both of these things happening has put us severely in the hole financially and now we don’t even have merch to sell to get us out of it. We have our van and are all safe and things could be so much worse, but anything at this point would be appreciated as we try to pick up the pieces. Thank you guys for understanding.

And if you’re still coming to one of the remaining shows of the Divine Inner Tension tour: we will see you there!