Her SUV was stolen in Montreal. A Good Samaritan on Facebook helped her get it back

Just as she had feared, a restaurant owner from eastern Quebec who visited Montreal had her SUV stolen, but says it was all thanks to the kindness of strangers on the internet — not the police — that she got it back.

Just as she had feared, a restaurant owner from eastern Quebec who visited Montreal had her SUV stolen, but says it was all thanks to the kindness of strangers on the internet — not the police — that she got it back.

Perle Morency, owner of the Côte Est restaurant in Kamouraska offers gastronomy tours in her Toyota SUV in the Bas-St-Laurent region and she came to Montreal to pick up local goods from suppliers.

She told CTV News she was a bit concerned about her SUV given everything she's heard about car thefts in Montreal and she was even making jokes about it with her friends. Last Thursday, her special edition 2023 Toyota 4Runner was stolen from a residential street in Rosemont and it was full of the local products she'd picked up.

She says she called police to report the theft and waited on the side of the street for hours and when she got tired of waiting she walked to the police station and filed a report in person. Morency says it was clear to her this wasn't a priority for them, and she was told she wasn't likely to see her SUV again so she was wasting her time.

That's when she turned to social media.

She posted a photo of her SUV, which has distinctive stickers on it, and recalls others telling her, "Forget it, you'll never find it" and "It's probably already in a shipping container on its way overseas."

But then, a man who also works in the food business and saw her post spotted her SUV on a street near Félix-Leclerc Park in the Mercier-Hochelaga-Maisonneuve borough. Not only that — he saw the person suspected of stealing the vehicle so he went after him, taking photos and a video along the way.