A family from Syracuse, N.Y. says five years' worth of work on a Ph.D. was lost when their car was broken into in downtown Montreal on Saturday.
Melisa Kohan was in town for Thanksgiving weekend with her husband, a doctoral student at Syracuse University, visiting her 90-year-old great aunt. The family had packed the car for their trip home on Saturday morning, near the corner of Sherbrooke and Drummond Sts., and had gone back to spend a and gone back up to her aunt's apartment to spend a couple more hours with her.
That's when the unthinkable happened.
"We came back down, our car window was smashed in," Melisa Kohan told CJAD 800, "and the items in the car had been taken."
Among the items stolen was a backpack containing a USB key, which held five years' worth of research for her husband's PhD, as well as a draft of his doctoral dissertation.
"Every ounce of him has been put into this work, and it was taken," she says. "There was a copy [of the USB key] on the computer which was in the backpack that was taken. There were backup USB ports, and those happened to be in the backpack that was taken."
Kohan says she called police. When they arrived, they told her they had been dealing with several similar break-ins in recent days in the area.
Kohan's husband was preparing to finalize his Ph.D., and now, she says, all of that is up in the air.
"He's really beside himself right now," she says. "The professors are heartbroken, too, because they've been invested in this research."
The family is offering a $5,000 reward for return of the key and the information — no questions asked.
"The backpack is the brand Cotopaxi, it is dark gray with a yellow logo on it," she says, "and the USB ports were in a small cloth pouch with penguins on it, and it was a light blue background."
If you have any information on where the key is, you can contact Melisa at melisa.keskin@gmail.com.