Professional baseball player Jared Young arrived at 7:30 p.m. Saturday night with his girlfriend Julia for his first visit to his Prince George hometown in a year.
His friend Jake LeBrun left a pickup truck for him in the airport parking lot and they loaded their checked luggage under the tonneau cover and headed for College Heights, where Jared’s mom Dana was waiting for them.
When they got to their destination, Jared’s heart sank.
He realized that the brown leather shoulder bag that contained his passport, identification, iPad and gifts for his family was nowhere to be found.
In the dark airport parking lot he had inadvertently left the bag on top of the truck cover and it fell off in the intersection of Highway 16 and Ferry Avenue near the Real Canadian Superstore at around 8 p.m. as he turned left off Ferry to head up west on the highway to his mom’s place.
Jared immediately turned on his iPhone’s Find My Device function and it showed the iPad was at the Superstore parking lot. But not long after that the signal went dead. Whoever found the bag had turned the iPad off. By the time he got there, 10 minutes after he discovered the loss, it was nowhere to be found.
Now Jared is scrambling to get his passport back so he can board a plane back to his home in Arizona next Sunday.
“The bag stayed on the vehicle the whole way until he got to the intersection and when Kat and Tanner (Jared’s sister-in-law and brother) posted it on Facebook, people had seen it in the middle of the intersection,” said Dana.
“They looked and could see the ping from the iPad was at Superstore and then it was turned off right away.
“He just wants to get his passport and ID back. This has basically consumed him since he’s been here. Even if they just dropped it off anonymously at (his dad) Randy’s mailbox, the address is on his ID. He needs to get a passport before he can go back to Arizona.
“It would be amazing if his bag is returned with all the contents, but if he could get his ID back, that would be incredible. We’re so hoping.”
The lost shoulder bag also contained several baseballs and Doosan Bears ball caps from the team in Korea where he played the second half of the season. Jared, Julia and his father Randy scoured the area, looking in dumpsters for his ID but came up empty. The family also asked at Superstore if there was any video surveillance but the cameras were not aimed at the intersection and no one has stepped forward with dash cam footage.
The 29-year-old utility outfielder went to Korea as an unrestricted free agent on Aug. 24, after playing 74 games this season in triple-A with the Memphis Redbirds, the St. Louis Cardinals’ top farm team.
Young played 22 Major League Baseball games over two seasons (2022 and 2023) with the Chicago Cubs, the team that drafted him in 2017.
This season he had immediate success with the Doosan Bears and became a favourite with the fans in Seoul as one of two Canadians on the Korean Baseball Organization team. In 38 games he hit .326 with 10 home runs, 39 RBI and 1.080 OPS and led the Bears into the playoffs with a fourth-place 74-68-2 record.
If you have any information about the whereabouts of Jared’s belongings, call Dana Young at 250-552-1540. A reward had been offered.
