EDITOR’S NOTE: This is one of the more discouraging things we’ve heard in a while.
This weekend the Hometown Hearts group held a fundraiser at the Almonte arena in support of local first responders suffering from PTSD. And someone walked off with the entire proceeds from the evening, over $1,000 — stolen from the cashbox.
This is about as low as you can go. First responders have a dangerous and highly stressful job, one most of us could not do. They’re the people who rush out and look after us in our worst moments — car crashes, fires, heart attacks. At two in the afternoon or two in the morning.
The community is already stepping up to replace the stolen funds — for instance, Rental Village has offered to match all donations up to $1,000.
Here is Hometown Hearts’ Facebook post:
Our post to you this morning unfortunately comes with some incredibly bad news.
It is with a heavy heart and feelings of hurt and betrayal we must announce that between 11:30pm and 12:00am well over $1,000.00 was stolen from a cash box at our event. We are still in shock this morning that this happened!
It takes a lot of time and money to pull off a fundraiser. Not to mention the people who attend, donating their time and money to help us try to raise funds in support of our local first responders suffering from PTSD. NOW, because of some individual we will be lucky if we don’t owe money at the end of this.
Our deepest apologies to everyone that attended and donated. We have done a lot of events and never dreamed that this would happen. We are truly sorry that someone did this and we have zero to show for this event. What started out to be an amazing and fun night, doing good and helping people has ended in disaster.
Hometown Hearts is entrusted with money from people from the various communities we fundraise for and we take it very seriously. We all work hard to ensure your money gets to the right person or organization it was raised for.
The support you have shown Hometown Hearts and our numerous fundraisers means the world to us. The shock we are feeling at this time is beyond comprehension.
It really is heartbreaking to think that someone would be able to do something like this. We are asking if anyone knows anything, has any information, pictures or notices that someone may have extra cash that perhaps they shouldn’t, to please reach out to us. We would love to get the money people trusted us with back and into the right hands. We will also be filing a police report as we feel it’s important that police be made aware this happened and perhaps can use leads to catch whoever did this.
To the individual that took the money . . . we don’t understand how you can think this was ok. How do you justify what you did? Maybe you needed it really bad but it still doesn’t give you the right to steal from others as the people we are trying to raise these funds for needed it too. We want you to know and understand the effects of your actions on others as we’ve stated above. What you did was not right. If you needed the money that bad you could have reached out to us, we may have been able to help you.
