Every day for the past 50 years, Walter Probizansky has walked in and out of the same iron gate standing in front of his Winnipeg home.
But on Wednesday night, the decades-old routine was interrupted.
“In the morning, when I got up to get the paper, I noticed the gate,” he said. “It wasn’t open. It wasn’t there period.”
Probizanksy believes it was lifted right off its hinges.
His granddaughter Tristi Probizanksy said she saw someone running away with it.
“I was just like telling him to stop and when I yelled that, he wouldn’t stop,” she said. “He just kept walking down the street.”
Probizanksy said the old iron gate looks like many of the others in the Elmwood neighborhood in the city’s northeast, leaving residents in the area on alert.
He suspects whoever stole it wanted to sell it as scrap metal.
“I don’t know why anybody would want to steal a gate,” he said. “If it’s for scrap metal, it’s worth not even a dollar.
"If somebody would have said, ‘Hey, I'm short a dollar,' I would have probably given it to him."
Logan Orloff, the owner of local metal business Orloff’s Scrap Metal, says household items are brought in all the time, but that old gates aren’t usually worth much.
“One of those wrought iron, older-style gates are approximately $5 to $10,” he said. “It wouldn’t be really any more than that.”
Orloff said if he suspects someone has brought in a stolen item, he calls the police. He and his staff are constantly on the lookout for items they know are missing and encourage anyone who’s had property stolen to contact them.
“If you have something like that (gate) taken, give our office a call so that we can be watching for these particular things,” Orloff said.
Meanwhile, Probizanksy likely won’t be replacing the gate because he’s had other metal items stolen from his yard before.
“Now I’ll have to put up a light…because it’s getting really sick for someone to steal a gate,” he said.
With a report from CTV Winnipeg’s Michelle Gerwing
