Help towards a new car after ours was stolen and lit on fire

Hya, I’m Viktorija and due to the comments received under some posts and from family and friends I’ve decided to create a GoFundMe page for my mums partner to help him towards buying a new car.

In the early hours of Thursday morning at around 5:40am (the 30th of Jan) my mums partner was getting ready to leave for work and decided to turn his car on and leave it running to defrost while he went back inside the house and to put his coat and shoes on and grab his stuff. Whilst in the kitchen he saw bright headlights of a car through the window blind which he thought might’ve been his so he went to check it out, also hearing really loud car noises and when he opened the front door he noticed his car was gone and someone was driving off with it, speeding off from the estate. Now this all happened within 2/3 minutes. He was just trying to save some time like I’m sure many of people do when it’s cold and we know it takes a good while for the car to fully defrost sometimes. We quickly phoned the police who advised us they would be on the look out for it and came to see us to take a brief statement.

Thankfully there was nothing valuable left in the car as the car documents were removed and the plan was for my mum to sort the car tax that day as this was due to renew by the end of the month.

Whilst the police left we later found out from a neighbour that a car was lit on fire only a few minutes away from home at around 7:30am. Now I immediately did think it would be his car, weird coincidence if it wasn’t but from the picture shown me I couldn’t make anything out. So mums partner and a family friend ended up going to the scene by the Drumcree Community Centre and right away knew it was his car and the license plate was visible. Unfortunately we’re unsure why police hadn’t phoned us by that point and we ended up finding out from a neighbour.

It was later found out online that the car was used to get around as 3 robberies took place in petrol stations in Clonoe, Ballyronan and Ballinderry where staff were threatened with a gun and money and cigarettes were stolen. So they would’ve driven the car back to Portadown, lit it up and ditched it, obviously running away from the scene and covering their finger prints etc.

As everyone can imagine this is like something from a movie and as a family we were shook, frightened and scared that for all we know it could’ve been mum and her partner that got threatened with a gun or worse. But I know this could’ve happened to anyone, we just got very unlucky. We’re also so grateful that we’re safe and at the end of the day it was just a car and nothing else happened and as far as we’re aware no one was injured.

Unfortunately the car insurance company isn’t able to cover anything for the theft or the damage from the fire as the car keys were left inside the car, a decision many people make because we feel safe to do so but clearly this is a lesson learnt to not leave your vehicle unattended. They are also unable to provide a temporary car or anything as it’s fully ruined and isn’t at all fixable whereas if it was they may we able to provide one while it got fixed.

Im posting this in hopes that if anyone is able to contribute even the tinies amount towards buying a new car that would be greatly appreciated as we know cars can be pricey and there’s been no time to particularly save for a new one and is an emergency as it’s needed for travel to work etc.

We’d be extremely grateful for any support received from the community.