B.C. man travels 3 hours to rescue stolen yard mannequin

One man in Nanaimo drove three hours to get his stolen garden ornament back.

NANAIMO, B.C. — Seeing as he enjoys fixing all sorts of things, Brian Nevay was intrigued to find a broken mannequin at a garage sale.

“He was all in pieces,” Brian says. “And I thought that was kinda cool.”

His wife, Terry, on the other hand, was not so sure.

“It’s kind of out there,” Terry laughs.

But after Brian repaired the mannequin, Terry discovered it could be fun finding outfits for him.

So, they named him Gunner and kept him around the house.

“He would scare us because we’d forget he was there,” Terry says.

So, Brian put Gunner outside on the roof of the van, before finding a permanent place on a platform above the fence, which proved popular with people passing by.

“It kind of makes people happy,” Terry says. “They’ll come by and they’ll toot their horn.”

Gunner — with his ever-changing outfits — was a fixture in the neighbourhood for almost a decade. Until that day Terry woke up in the middle of the night to find the mannequin was missing.

“I said, ‘Brian! I think Gunner’s gone!,’” Terry recalls. “So, he gets his pants on and goes outside and goes, ‘[gasp] He is!’”

After being missing for more than a month, Terry and Brian were told the mannequin was mourned by neighbours of all ages.

“Every time this little boy heard sirens, he said, ‘Is that the police looking for Gunner?’” Brian recalls with a smile.

Eventually Brian offered a $100 reward for his return, which led to a stranger sending him a picture of Gunner attached to the front of a boat.

“That’s definitely my mannequin,” Brian points to the photo on his phone. “So, I definitely have to go track him down.”

Brian ended up rescuing the mannequin from a town almost three hours away, before returning Gunner to his perch on the fence and locking him up with a chain.

Terry recalls the joy of seeing him home. “We were so happy!”

Recently, they wondered if Gunner’s fans would be even happier if the mannequin had a mate. But the only one Brian could find had no face.

“It was kind of freaky,” Brian laughs.

So, Terry asked her hairdresser to give the mannequin a makeover. And after the stylist went above and beyond to paint a dynamic face on her, Gunner has a girlfriend named Jillian.

“It’s just about trying to do something nice for someone,” Terry smiles after she dressed up Jillian, and secured her to the fence next to Gunner. “It’s nice to make people smile and somewhere along the way, it’ll affect somebody in a positive way.”