Parents’ heartache as thieves steal baby’s remains:
ACOUPLE have been left ‘absolutely devastated’ after sick thieves stole a memorial containing their unborn baby’s remains from their new home.
Kyle Livesey and Paige Rhodes were heartbroken after their baby died on May 1 this year from a miscarriage when Paige was around three months pregnant.
However, just one day after moving into their new home on Whalley Road in Clayton-le-Moors a special plant pot memorial containing the baby’s remains was stolen from their back yard.
Kyle, 20, said it was the ‘final resting place for our little baby and we need it back more than anything’.
He told the Observer: “It has absolutely no face value to anybody else. It is purely sentimental to myself and my partner. It makes no sense why anyone would do this.
“We are absolutely devastated. It’s all we’ve got as a reminder to our baby.
“I’ve grown up in Clayton. All my family live in Clayton. We were really excited to move in.
“It was a new start for us both and things were looking a lot better until someone had done this absolutely horrible thing to us.
“We are both a bit lost now with what to do. It’s like we have gone through losing the baby all over again.”
Kyle, who is studying an online Open University course, said he first realised the baby memorial was missing from the back yard on the morning of Friday, August 18, along with a large broken television belonging to the previous tenant.
When he broke the news to Blackburn Col- lege student Paige, 17, he said she ‘instantly got really upset’.
Kyle said: “I was still in shock. We just didn’t know what to do. It was a very strange situation.
“The first thing I did was knock on neighbours and a shop next door to see if they had seen anything. They all said they had seen the pot but had no idea what had happened to it.”
Kyle said they did not report the theft to police straight away, hoping the thief would ‘gain a conscience’ and return it.
The memorial included a heart-shape plaque placed in the pot which read: ‘In loving memory of our sleeping angel. 01/05/2017. Even the smallest of footprints have the power to leave an everlasting imprint on the Earth’.
Paige and Kyle did not know whether they were due to have a boy or a girl.
Kyle said: “We thought if one of them had taken it then they would gain a conscience and put it back so we did leave it for over a day hoping it would appear back in the garden but that didn’t happen.
“We still walk around and have a look in back alleys just hoping somebody might have thrown it out somewhere and we could find it.
“We just want as many people to know about it as possible because it will heighten our chances.
“We don’t really care about the person or the reason why they’ve done it. We don’t care, we just want it back.
“More than anything we just want it back.”
‘It’s all we’ve got as a reminder to our baby’