Jewelry collection now a mangled mess
Collection from safe reduced to mangled mess
The Daily Item
It was around 10 o’clock at night on a Friday in August, almost two years ago, when Donna Deitrick went to the Shamokin asbestos removal business owned by her and her now ex-husband, Robert Yoncuski.
As she loaded things she considered her property into a truck that belonged to the business, a Shamokin police officer stopped by to see what she was doing there, Ms. Deitrick recalled in a Friday morning interview.
Ms. Deitrick told him and showed him her identification. Apparently satisfied that she was entitled to take the items, the police officer left, but Mr. Yoncuski then showed up.
He parked his truck so that she couldn’t leave and then went to talk to a couple police officers who were parked nearby. Ms. Deitrick yelled at the group that Mr. Yoncuski wasn’t supposed to be near her since she’d obtained a protection-from-abuse order against him. But no one moved Mr. Yoncuski’s truck, so she did.
The she got back into the truck that she’d loaded up and began to drive away. A short time later, a police officer pulled her over. When he asked her for the vehicle registration and insurance, she provided it. But the officer replied that Mr. Yoncuski said he’d taken her off the insurance policy, so she couldn’t drive the truck. Without insurance, she had to get a ride, the police officer told her.
She called a friend on the telephone and he came to get her. When they arrived at her West Cameron Township house, the front door had been busted open.
And when she made it to her bedroom, she discovered her safe was gone.
Inside it was $700,000 belonging to Ms. Deitrick’s brother, Kenneth Deitrick, and a multi-million-dollar jewelry collection she’d gathered over 40 years.
No one knows the value of the jewelry in the safe, Ms. Deitrick’s attorney Greg Moro, said. That’s partly because all of the appraisals done on Ms. Deitrick’s jewelry had been kept together. In the safe.
Current estimates put the missing jewelry’s worth at $4 million. Among the missing items are the wedding rings of Ms. Deitrick’s mother and grandmother.
But dozens of boxes of jewelry were returned to Ms. Deitrick, including a clump of gold chains that been balled together. Much of the jewelry was returned in a tattered black plastic garbage bag, Ms. Deitrick said.
And many of the pieces — including numerous antique gold watches — were damaged. About half of the rings were returned minus the jewels.
Ms. Deitrick has hired a jeweler who has spent more than four months trying to determine which pieces can be repaired, and she and a friend spent countless hours painstakingly unwinding the tangled web of golden chains. “It’s depressing,” Ms. Deitrick said after describing the chore of trying to clean up the mud-covered and water-damaged pieces of jewelry.
While the disappearance of Ms. Deitrick’s safe prompted much local media coverage, the condition of the items when they were returned hasn’t been publicly discussed until now, Mr. Moro said.
“This is much worse than people think it is,” he said. “When this all comes out in court, there’s going to be a substantial amount of restitution,” he said.
All of which begs the question: Who damaged Ms. Deitrick’s jewels?
Mr. Yoncuski has been charged with stealing the safe and its contents. But, as for the damage to the jewels, he had a pretty good alibi during much of the time that the safe was missing.
He was in jail.
Mr. Yoncuski was incarcerated for six months on a contempt of court charge for refusing a judge’s order to explain where the missing safe was. He got out of jail in February 2005 by finally disclosing the safe’s whereabouts. It was found buried on a property near Dorsnife. But the safe was empty. The jewelry was returned to police separately. Ms. Deitrick has yet to learn where it was before she was called to come to the state police barracks to claim her property.
Last summer, Mr. Yoncuski formally admitted that he took the safe. But after another six months of delays before sentencing on the charges, he changed his position. This spring, he told a Northumberland County judge that he wished to withdraw his guilty plea, because as his attorney explained in court, “(Mr. Yoncuski) maintains his innocence.”
On Friday morning, Mr. Yoncuski was scheduled to have a pre-trial conference, but that was postponed because attorneys will be in court Aug. 8 to address a pre-trial motion in the case, a court administrator said.
The delay in bringing the case to trial has left, Ms. Deitrick tremendously frustrated.
“I think Donna would just like to see this resolved,” Mr. Moro said. “I want this to move along and finish up.
The attorney said Ms. Deitrick will seek to recover her loss through the civil court system, but those efforts won’t occur before the criminal case against Mr. Yoncuski is completed one or another.
If Mr. Yoncuski is convicted of stealing the safe and jewelry, then a judge would most likely order him to repay Ms. Deitrick. “But the longer it goes on, the more difficult it’s going to be to collect restitution,” Mr. Moro said.
“I don’t think I’m getting a fair shake … People say to me, ‘If I stole a pack of cigarettes, I’d be sitting in jail. But Bob took all of that jewelry from you and he’s still walking around free,” Ms. Deitrick said.
