Theft of car derails teen’s trip for surgery

It was a U-turn in more ways than one Tuesday for a California family passing through the Eugene-Springfield area on their way to Seattle.

For 24 hours the news could not have been much worse for Wayne Souza, his wife, Carol Gibson, and the couple’s 16-year-old daughter, Simba.

Not only was their dark blue 1998 Subaru Legacy station wagon stolen Monday afternoon from the Super 8 Motel on Gateway Street in Springfield, where they had stopped briefly to visit friends, so was the $1,000 in Gibson’s purse the family planned to use to survive for a 17-day stay in Seattle, where Simba was scheduled to undergo bladder surgery at Seattle Children’s Hospital at 7 a.m. today.

Also in Gibson’s purse were her credit cards, ID and her daughter’s medical insurance card. Simba’s medical files and a CD of her renal ultrasound also were in the car.

Having missed the Tuesday pre-op appointment in Seattle, and having no way to get there, the family decided to head back to California. Gibson’s father, Darrell Gibson, drove up Tuesday from the family’s hometown of Willits, Calif., to get them.

They were just about to pull out of the parking lot at the Super 8 when Wayne Souza’s cell phone rang. It was Springfield police Sgt. Rich Charboneau calling to say they’d found the car in a residential neighborhood in northeast Eugene, about two miles away. Darrell Gibson raced his Chrysler PT cruiser over there.

“Awesome!” Souza hollered toward a Springfield police officer at the scene on Matt Drive, just north of Crescent Avenue, near the Eugene Swim & Tennis Club. “Thank you! Thank you!”

“Oh, my god! I’m, like, so happy my car is OK,” Simba said.

Jim Myers, who lives in a townhouse on Matt Drive, saw the car with the California license plates parked on the street as he returned home from having lunch Tuesday.

“I (saw) a little flash about that Subaru wagon,” Myers said of watching the 11 p.m. news on KVAL Monday night. “And I didn’t think anything about it.”

But as he was returning home, he noticed the dark blue car. “You know, that kind of (looks) like that wagon,” he thought to himself.

Myers called KVAL. Someone at the station suggested he call Springfield police.

“You gotta do what you gotta do,” Myers said.

The vehicle actually belongs to Simba, said Carol Gibson, who had inadvertently left the keys in the car on Monday while the family visited with friends Ted and Rikki Jones on the second floor of the Super 8 Motel. The couple, also from Willits, were returning to California from a Montana motorcycle trip. When Simba and her parents came back downstairs 10 or 15 minutes later, their car was gone.

Simba was born with a malformed bladder, which is not life-threatening, but causes great discomfort, Wayne Souza said. She had her first surgery when she was 4 days old, he said. After about a dozen failed surgeries in California, she finally had a successful one at Seattle Children’s when she was 7, her father said, and has not needed another one until now.

Although the car was given back to them by Springfield police, after dusting for fingerprints, the family decided to head back to California instead of trying to persuade doctors in Seattle to go on with today’s surgery.

“This has been an experience,” Wayne Souza said. “We just need to go home now.” They are not sure when the surgery can be rescheduled, but are hoping sometime this year.

In addition to stealing Gibson’s purse, the thief, or thieves, also took the Subaru’s GPS system. The family’s luggage and Simba’s medical records were still in the car, though.

Also left behind was an empty McDonald’s cup that did not belong to the family. Springfield police detective Pete Kirkpatrick was busy dusting it for prints. Asked if someone might regret leaving that behind, Kirkpatrick said: “Yep.”

Anyone with information about the theft can call Springfield police at 541-726-3714.