It was the jackpot for a thief: two Macbook Airs and three Seagate hard drives. But for Wayne Adam, it was infinitely more than that.
For the past five years, Adam, who is originally from Toronto, has been travelling around Canada taking photos of national parks and historic sites in the hopes of creating a series of guidebooks.
“Some of them are very isolated places,” he said. “For example, the oldest lighthouse in the Western Hemisphere is in Nova Scotia and to get there, there’s no public transit. It took me a four-month effort to … locate someone with a boat who would go out, in perfect conditions, to finally reach this lighthouse on an island.
“That’s just one of hundreds and hundreds of historic sites, lighthouses, heritage railroad stations — you name it — that I’ve been out documenting for years.”
So when someone smashed the window of Adam’s minivan in downtown Montreal earlier this month while he photographed the Christ Church Cathedral, they took much more than electronics with them. Adam estimates there were about 1.2 million photos on the devices spanning more than a decade, with half of those years dedicated to his project of documenting historic sites.
“I was standing there in shock for quite a while with an umbrella, shielding the open window from the rain, not knowing what to do next,” he said.
Community Facebook groups have been inundated with posts about smashed vehicle windows across the city recently. So far in 2024, the Montreal police received 6,445 reports for thefts in or on a vehicle and 2,979 reports of damage to a vehicle.
The force’s 2023 annual review, meanwhile, shows it received 2,778 reports for thefts in or on a vehicle and 1,125 reports for damage to a vehicle that year — but that data comes from online reports only. The SPVM could not confirm in time for publication whether the 2024 data — which is much higher than that of 2023 — includes reports filed other ways.
The 2023 figures show that thefts in or on a vehicle increased by 4.8 per cent over the past five years, while reports for damage to vehicles increased by 27.3 per cent.
Adam filed a report online a day after the theft took place. He heard nothing for a while, but a few weeks later, the SPVM said it would comb through security camera footage in the area.
Before police had responded, Adam said he was able to confirm from the Hudson Bay’s footage that the thief was a white male wearing a hoodie and that the theft occurred just before 6 p.m. on Saturday, Sept. 7. When the man left, he walked north up Aylmer St., Adam said.
“Since then, I’ve done nothing else but focus on trying to track down where this stuff has gone to,” he said. “I have walked the streets talking to people, including folks who live on the streets. I’ve gone to drug dealers. I’ve talked to a private investigator and enlisted their help. I have created a poster with a reward and posted it, although they keep taking them down.”
Adam tried contacting Apple to see if the company could track the computers even though the “Find My” feature wasn’t activated — to no avail. He has also been searching resale websites Kijiji, Craigslist and Facebook Marketplace and visiting electronic repair stores and pawn shops.
“I’m at wits’ end, but it represents so much work, so much effort, that I’m putting everything I can into it,” he said.
Replicating five years of work would be a daunting if not impossible task, Adam said.
“It’s not just static sites and events — a lot of things that I photographed cannot be replicated easily because they were unique,” he said. “I went out to Saint Pierre and Miquelon. I went up to the Torngat Mountains, in northernmost Labrador. Polar bears. Icebergs. Whales. Fantastic sites. Abandoned Moravian mission sites that are national historic sites, remote communities you can only get to by boat … taking hours to get out and back. There’s one view of Gros Morne National Park … it’s a very difficult vantage point. So I did it in winter when it’s most easy, but it’s a two-hour snowmobile ride to get out there to take those photos.”
“A lot of effort and expense,” he added. “Those pictures are just gold to me.”
Adam has hope his devices could turn up eventually and said he would appreciate help from anyone with tips on how to track them down. He can be reached at [email protected].
Though Adam said some have suggested his efforts are akin to looking for a needle in a haystack, “there is a needle in there somewhere.”
Anyone with information about the theft can call Info-Crime Montréal at 514-393-1133.