Man’s ashes stolen from family’s rental car at Fisherman’s Wharf

Thieves near Fisherman’s Wharf broke into a car and stole the velvet-wrapped silver container that held Joe Wilkinson’s remains.

Thieves near Fisherman’s Wharf broke into a car and stole the velvet-wrapped silver container that held Joe Wilkinson’s remains. Photo: Michael Macor, The Chronicle Buy photo Photo: Michael Macor, The Chronicle Image 1 of / 4 Caption Close Man’s ashes stolen from family’s rental car at Fisherman’s Wharf 1 / 4 Back to Gallery

Julia Wilkinson planned to scatter the ashes of her father among the redwoods Thursday on what would have been his 57th birthday.

But the 30-year-old from North Carolina’s last goodbye to her dad, Joe Wilkinson, who died from a heart attack Aug. 19 at 56, ground to a halt Wednesday afternoon, when thieves near San Francisco’s Fisherman’s Wharf broke into the car she had rented with her mother, Mary, and took just about everything — including the velvet-wrapped silver container that held Joe’s remains.

Julia Wilkinson parked her rented 2016 Hyundai Elantra inside Anchorage Square Parking at 500 Beach St. at 1:19 p.m. — she had the receipt to prove it — and left to do with her mother all the Fisherman’s Wharf things that Joe had loved while he was alive: feasting on Dungeness crab and wandering up and down the pier and stopping by the sea lions and living life at leisure. The two had time to kill before their Airbnb in the Mission would let them check in.

Though Wilkinson grew up with her parents in Charlotte, she said she and her mother and her father became enamored with the “magic that this city has,” having visited four or so times.

The enchantment shattered at 5:15 p.m., when the mother and daughter made their way back to the garage from a half-day on the pier, feeling better than they had at home, because “home was hard.”

The pair found the Elantra’s trunk jimmied open, with most everything inside gone. Gone was her dad, as were a suitcase full of “irreplaceable clothes,” credit cards and cash.

“They took a suitcase, they took a wallet, and then they took my dad,” Wilkinson said, recounting her day as she worked to file a report with the San Francisco Police Department online. She finally had Wi-Fi.

That was the other problem, she said: A nearby security camera missed the car by a hair, and no one wanted to help her.

Wilkinson said she called 311, then 911, where dispatchers on both lines told her they wouldn’t send officers to the scene unless a person was missing. One was missing, she reasoned, but it was a little complicated.

They insisted, she said, that she would have to file an online report or come into a police station in person. And the attendants at the parking lot said there was little they could do, either — one eventually offered to reimburse her the $32 parking bill from the garage.

“My dad is worth way more than $32,” she said.

Police and a representative of the parking garage did not immediately return a request for comment.

“The cops won’t do anything because this is a habitual thing,” Wilkinson said, adding that an attendant at the garage told her at least two break-ins had happened there before, and it was becoming commonplace.

It’s not the first time this has happened in San Francisco. In May 2015, a man living in the Inner Richmond had his car stolen, and inside were his late wife’s ashes. The car was recovered by a police officer one block away, with the ashes still in the trunk.

And in March 2015, a woman living in Potrero Hill had her home ransacked, with thieves stealing an urn containing the ashes of her mother.

The missing items in the Elantra included Joe Wilkinson’s favorite T-shirts, including the Philadelphia Flyers one Julia planned to wear Thursday morning on the long trek to the Redwood parks that span some 50 miles from northwest California into Oregon.

Originally from Philadelphia, Joe Wilkinson was a “die-hard hockey fan, a loving father and husband, and just hardworking” in his job as a salesman, Julia Wilkinson said.

She spent the evening calling around to local consignment shops, hoping, somehow, that someone had dropped off the container that meant so much to her.

“I want to throw up,” she said in the evening, contemplating what the morning would bring. “I want to throw up right now.”

Just a few hours earlier, Wilkinson had mused with her mother what it would be like to leave her job as a property manager in Charlotte and move together to San Francisco, a country away from memories she would rather forget. Not so much anymore.

“I wish I could get my clothes back,” she said, voice cracking. “But my main concern is getting my dad.”

Michael Bodley is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: mbodley@sfchronicle.com. Twitter: @michael_bodley