Photos of dying child were on mom’s phone

A Calgary mother has issued an emotional plea for the return of a lost cellphone containing the last photos she has of her two-year-old son who died of cancer last year.

Rachel Thomson discovered her cellphone was missing Sunday afternoon shortly after leaving the parking lot of a Co-op grocery store on 16 Avenue and 5th Street N.E.

It quickly dawned on her that gone with it were the last photos she had taken of her son, Zachary, before he died last July from a form of cancer called rhabdomyosarcoma.

“I was frantic. I hoped that maybe I had lost it in the car or that it would be turned in. Once I had searched my house (and) car and returned to Co-op and found nothing, I broke down. It’s hard enough to lose a child, but to have all those memories vanish as well is just devastating,” Thomson said.

“I had a lot of photos of his treatment and the ups and downs that we went through — when he lost his hair, when he got to leave the hospital for the first time after diagnosis.”

The missing phone is a Samsung Galaxy S5 Neo inside a pink-andwhite OtterBox case. Thomson said she believes the phone must have been picked up since she was able to track the phone online briefly before it stopped returning a location on 4:30 p.m. Sunday.

The experience has been a harsh lesson for Thomson, who said she’ll be backing up her photos in multiple locations from now on.

“I just want the SD card back. I just want my memories of my baby. It’s all I have left of him. If I got the whole phone back that would be great, but it’s the card I truly care about and the memories stored on it.”