#MustRead: Mother's Joy As Thief Who Stole Her Purse With Pictures Of Her Dead Baby Finds a Conscience & Returns Them

A New York woman says she's overjoyed after discovering photos of her late infant son were returned to her by the thief who stole them along with her purse.

Patricia Harris, 27, discovered her purse had been stolen at roughly 5:30 p.m. Friday upon returning home with her four children, who range in age from 2 to 6 years old.

'Having to get four children settled is a handful,' she said. 'I realized I didn't have my purse. When I

went back to the car to get it, it was gone. The memory card was in my purse. I was lost. I cried a lot.'

Inside that purse was a memory card containing the pictures she had of her son, Cole Brady Fogle, who was born on Dec. 10 and died on Feb. 22 of sudden infant death syndrome. Those 500 images were the only copies Harris had.

'It's like I'm losing him all over again,' she described the feeling later. 'I want them back.'

She and fiance Michael Fogle, 30, immediately began taping up fliers around the neighborhood with a picture of Cole begging for the return of the memory card.

'And then I just lost it. I wrote a note with black crayon that said 'keep the tablet and phone but please return the memory card. It has pictures of my son. He died on February 22. He was two and a half months old,' she told Local 21 News.

She even left her car door unlocked in the hopes that whoever took the purse would return the photos.

As she waited, her story made the rounds online, being shard more than 500 times on Facebook to sympathetic readers who wanted to see the photos returned as much as Harris did.

'I just want to get the word out there,' she told The York Daily Record. 'I didn't realize so many people would respond that way.'

Then when she was at work the following Monday she got a text from Fogle around 1:30 p.m. telling her the memory card had been returned to the car.

It was tucked into her Comcast work badge, which had also been in her purse, and left dangling from the rearview mirror.

Both the purse and the other items it held remain missing though Harris recently learned one of her credit cards had been used at a local Turkey Hill.  No arrests in the theft have been made.

Still, Harris said she got back the only thing that mattered.

'I guess the thief has a potion of a heart,' she told The York Dispatch. 'You just take things and you don't know what you're stealing from someone and what it means for that person or their family.'