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Booze has fuelled a good deal of crime. This time, it helped solve one.

On the morning of Jan. 6, the township of Callander, about 3,800 souls on the edge of North Bay, woke to some sad news. The mayor, Hector Lavigne, had died overnight in a Sudbury hospital at age 62 after collapsing in a parking lot in North Bay and falling into a coma.

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His wife Lynne and three boys rushed to Sudbury to be at his side. But he perished at about 4:30 a.m.

Then, impossibly, things got even worse.

“As we’re leaving the ICU,” said his middle son, Chris, 37, “we get a call to find out the house was broken into.”

After making the 90-minute drive through a snowstorm back to Callander, the family arrived at a crime scene, the house ransacked. When word spread, people were outraged at the dastardly act — robbing the house of a dying man, while the family is at his bedside, 140 kilometres away?

“Property crimes are typically hard for victims to deal with, but the fact these people took advantage of a tragic situation to commit a criminal offence is particularly heinous,” said North Bay police chief Scott Tod in a news release.