A family in Las Vegas is on a mission to find the parents of a child whose urn they found in a stolen truck.
Ahmad Ervin, 42, found the urn of a child — with the name Marcel Akarhi Alexander inscribed on it —when he was cleaning out his truck after it was stolen.
The saga began when Ervin, owner of a moving company, woke up on the morning of Wednesday, Sept. 25, to find his truck had been stolen outside his Las Vegas, Nev., home, he tells PEOPLE in an interview.
After filing a police report, he went around looking for his truck himself, and with the help of tips from some people who were homeless, he was able to track it down early in the morning on Sunday, Sept. 29.
Ervin subsequently looked through the truck and found lots of seemingly stolen goods, such as a wallet and purses, he says, which police soon took away as evidence.
Ervin was left to clean out the remaining items in the truck, including a lot of clothes, he says.
“When I picked up a [pile] of clothes, I felt something heavy,” he says. “I take a look at it and realized it’s an urn.”
The sign on the urn says the child was born on Jan 7. 2020 and died on Feb. 20, 2020. The urn is decorated with a mini sculpture of a baby sleeping, wrapped in a pair of angel wings.
Ervin says he didn’t want to throw away the ashes, so he set out to look for the family or parents they may belong to.
Ervin’s girlfriend called her sister, Danielle Belin, to tell her about the ashes. Belin, 50, herself has lost children, she tells PEOPLE.
“It just tore me apart,” Belin says of learning about Marcel’s urn. “It’s like having your child kidnapped, pretty much. It was our job to find out whose child it is to return to his parents.”
Urns of Marcel Akarhi Alexander (left); Urns of Danielle Belin’s children Paulette, John, Ronielle and Robert.
Danielle Belin
Belin placed the urn next to the urns of four of her deceased children.
She also reached out to a local funeral home by tracking the name on the urn. That lead has not yielded answers as of press time.
Belin is raising awareness about her mission on social media and says the response has been “overwhelming,” with many people trying to help her.
