NORTH CAROLINA COMPUTER CONTAINING SENTIMENTAL DATA STOLEN Thief steals more than a computer

Thief steals more than a computer

Monday, December 10, 2007

When the age of the personal computer broke, Charles Dudley wasn't a young man, but he delved into the capabilities of that powerful desktop machine.

When he died Thanksgiving Day, at 81, his Dell hard drive was chock full of his creative projects: personalized greeting cards; scanned-in family photos; hand-made, one-of-a-kind certificates designed for friends and loved ones; poems and asides created to honor the God he worshipped.

His only child, Donna Tripp of Greenville, along with the rest of Dudley's immediate family, looked forward to perusing those mementos as a way to remember him and assuage their own grief at his passing.

But a thief broke into Dudley's Bradford Park apartment a week after he died and stole his desktop computer and all of those memories inside it — robbing the man's loved ones of a chance to keep that part of him alive.

"That's the only thing they took," Donna Tripp said of last month's break-in.

But the loss of the desktop computer was enough of an injury to the family.

"My dad has been into computers for years," Tripp said, slipping into the present tense as she talked about her father Sunday at her home. "He was a gadget person."

He bought a program for making greeting cards. And he used it often, she said, creating one-off designs for family and friends to mark holidays, birthdays, and just about any occasion that moved him.

Dudley used a program and his imagination to create special certificates, too.

One kept by Tripp dubs her "The World's No. 1 Mother."

When he moved for a time into an assisted-living facility, he appealed to have his computer hooked up there. He became the defacto print shop, putting out designer place mats to mark special events, Tripp said.

There were more than 2,000 e-mails stored on his Dell when he died, she said. Going through her dad's wallet, Tripp found a photo of her mother that he had scanned into the computer and printed.

What treasures might he have created that never made it down the computer wires to his desktop printer and the light of day? Tripp wonders.

After the break-in, she contacted Dudley's financial institutions to head off misuse of sensitive information he kept on the computer, she said. Those practical concerns about identity theft and fraud aren't foremost in her mind in thinking about the theft of the computer and hard drive.

"To me, it was just my last link to my dad," she said. "It's gone, and that kind of thing can't be replaced."

As an only child, "I don't have brothers and sisters to sit (with) and talk about daddy."

"It would have just allowed me to, I guess, have more of his presence in my life," Tripp said.

"Maybe," she continued, "he had typed something in there just for me to see after he was gone."

Her grandson, she said, was hit hard by the loss of that electronic treasure chest as well.

As a graphic design student at Pitt Community College, Brian Tripp took special interest in his grandfather's creations.

"It's just the one thing that my son really wanted from his grandfather," said his mother.

Police dusted for prints at her father's apartment, but Tripp doesn't think they retrieved anything usable.

Now, her hope this holiday season is that whoever's got the computer will realize what's on it and return it, somehow.

"I'm one for believing in the best in people," she concluded, "that people will do the right thing."

T. Scott Batchelor can be contacted at sbatchelor@coxnc.com and 329-9567.