Kids With Cancer Get Back Stolen Toys

NORTH MIAMI, FL — Silvia Vanni is no stranger to impossible causes. But when police told her it was unlikely she would ever get back her stolen trailer filled with $5,000 worth of toys, she wondered if there was some higher purpose at hand. The toys were going to children suffering from cancer like her son, Salvatore, who would have celebrated his 14th birthday last Saturday.

"I feel that he had something to do with the recovery of our trailer and of all of those toys," she confided. Salvatore Vanni passed away in 2011. "In the morning, I never imagined that it would be recovered." (Sign up for our free Daily Newsletters and Breaking News Alerts for the Aventura Patch.)

That was on Monday morning. By Monday night things looked very different.

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After posting a photo of her black Freedom Trailer on Facebook, the tips started rolling in, including at least one from Sunrise, Florida, which is in the next county over.

"They gave us very little hope to ever finding it," she said of her local police department's assessment of the stolen trailer. "I came home. I put it on Facebook, and it just kept getting shared and shared and shared. All of south Florida knew what was going on."

Her post was shared more than 1,400 times in a matter of hours.

The tip from Sunrise proved to be dead on. The trailer was parked outside a single-family home in the 9100 block of NW 25th Court. The home was being rented at the time by a couple via Airbnb. They had no idea that the trailer belonged to Vanni's Mystic Force Foundation, which was created to honor the memory of her son.

But when police opened the trailer, it was empty, and Vanni's heart sank yet again.

"We waited for a search warrant for a little shed that they had in the backyard," she recalled. That finally arrived between 2:30 a.m. and 2:45 a.m. on Tuesday morning. "We went to the back, and police opened the shed. The majority of the the toys were in there."

Sunrise police subsequently charged 25-year-old Endy and 30-year-0ld Dudley Merus of North Miami with larceny.

They are accused of driving into Vanni's gated community in North Miami, hooking up their vehicle to the large trailer full of toys and driving back out.

Vanni, whose husband is a neurosurgeon at the University of Miami, said that the Mystic Force Foundation distributes toys at monthly parties for children suffering from cancer at the Nicklaus Children's Hospital in Miami and at quarterly parties held at the Joe DiMaggio Children's Hospital in Hollywood.

Fortunately, the Mystic Force held its April party last week before the theft. It was a superhero party to celebrate Salvatore's birthday because he loved superheroes.

In addition to the many toys it distributes, the group also raises money for research. It keeps the toys separate from monetary donations so that 100 percent of the money it collects can be used for research.

Vanni's husband heads up a research laboratory at the University of Miami, which is trying to find a cure for childhood neuroblastoma, which took their son.

Next week Silvia Vanni will travel to Washington, D.C., to plead for more federal funding for childhood cancer, and in a strange way the toy theft is helping to raise awareness.

"I have been having so many people call and donate toys and others that want to donate money," she explained. "One hundred percent of all monetary donations to our foundation go to research, so if anybody wants to donate toys they have to actually give us gift cards to buy the toys or they can bring the toys, or we can pick them up."

Vanni said that fewer than 4 percent of all government funding for medical research goes to fighting childhood cancer, and this theft may help change that.

"That's for all 12 types of childhood cancers combined of which there’s hundreds of sub types," she told Patch. "Most people don’t know that childhood cancer is the number one disease killer of children and very little federal funding goes to childhood cancer."

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Silvia Vanni (right) and her sister-in-law Ellen Vanni Bunch stand guard over the many toys that were recovered by Sunrise police. Photo courtesy Silvia Vanni.