A Nanaimo woman is in disbelief after a callous thief made off with her cell phone while she was rendering aid to someone involved in a serious car crash.

It happened on Saturday around 8 p.m. Anne Marie Behan was wrapping Christmas presents in her living room near Third Street and Wakesiah Avenue when she heard a loud collision outside her home.

She heard kids screaming, so she ran out into the street in her flip flops to see if she could help — taking her phone and not much else.

Once outside, she saw that several vehicles had been involved in the crash, including a white SUV with an unconscious boy in the back seat.

Behan was worried the boy’s neck might have been broken and she noticed he was breathing irregularly.

“I put my phone down on the hood of the truck, I said we can’t move this boy we just have to hold him still,” she said.

Behan spent about 10 minutes holding the boy’s head steady until she was relieved by paramedics arriving at the scene.

“And when I backed up I went to grab my phone and it was gone,” she said.

“I thought, ‘Nobody would have taken my phone right now, there’s no way, somebody picked it up for me.’”

But the phone really was gone.

Nanaimo RCMP Const. Gary O’Brien said the going theory is that someone took advantage of the chaos to pilfer the device.

“When the dust had settled, somebody had taken the phone. She heard from somebody at the scene they saw a guy snooping around the car, so he may have taken it,” he said.

“She is absolutely devastated, the phone is her lifeline. She uses it to contact her daughter and contact her work. And it’s not much of a phone, but it’s hers. And she desperately wants it back.”

Behan said all she wants is for someone to return the phone — a black LG Shilo ← and she doesn’t care who took it or why.

She’s using a borrowed device in the meantime.

As for the crash, Behan said the story has a silver lining.

She spoke with the boy in the back seat recently, and said that he’s doing OK, even if he doesn’t remember anything about the crash.

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