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When her son died during a backpacking trip a few weeks ago, Kathy Hunt knew she and her husband had to bring his ashes home to Kansas themselves.

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“I said I don’t want to ship our boy home like a package,” she said in a tearful interview Wednesday evening. “I want to go to L.A. and pick him up, and I want to take him home ourselves. We wanted to be with him.”

So Steve and Kathy Hunt packed up 32-year-old Kyle Hunt’s ashes and his belongings at his home in California. And then they got in a moving truck towing a car and headed east to their small town of Wamego, Kan.

In Albuquerque, they lost Kyle again.

Tuesday morning the couple discovered the car and the truck, which had been parked next to the Hampton Inn on Carlisle and Interstate 40 where they’d spent the night, had been broken into.

They say thieves stole some of Kyle’s belongings: a flat-screen TV, a backpack, a duffel bag and a framed collection of photos. Also stolen was a suitcase holding a cardboard box, wrapped in a treasured blanket. Inside the box were the remains of their son.

“I saw the glass and I saw everything was gone,” Steve Hunt said. “It was like a kick in the stomach. It’s so bad you can’t process it.”

In the days since Steve and Kathy Hunt reported the theft to police, a chaplain from the Albuquerque Police Department has sat with them, lending them support.

Once the story got out, strangers recognized them and stopped on the street to say how sorry they were. A woman dropped by the hotel Wednesday afternoon to give them a hug and words of comfort.

Several others have offered up cash or gifts.

“I was sitting on the bench in the sun this morning, and a man came up to me,” Steve Hunt said. “He saw the story on TV this morning, and he and his co-workers got some money together and gave me a gas card and $50.”

The Hunts have fixed the broken window to the car and they’ve stayed in touch with police. They’ve done interviews with a television station and a radio station.

And every time the phone rings, they hope for good news.

“There are only so many things you can do to stay busy before your mind just runs,” Kathy Hunt said. “I go back to the original thinking about Kyle and how he died.”

Steve Hunt said their son, an aerospace engineer at The Spaceship Co. in Mojave, Calif., had set out on a multi-day trek on the Pacific Crest Trail near Los Angeles on Feb. 11. When the couple didn’t hear from him the following Sunday, they grew concerned.

A stranger found Kyle’s backpack, with his phone and his wallet, at the bottom of a steep and icy incline. He called the Hunts, who called police, and by the time the couple flew into Los Angeles, search and rescue teams had found his body.

Steve Hunt said he believes his son, despite careful planning in other areas, had not accounted for snow and ice and slipped off the trail. He said investigators told him Kyle Hunt died from injuries sustained from the fall and from hypothermia.

Steve and Kathy Hunt attended a memorial at Kyle’s workplace in California and planned to let his brother help pick out the urn for his ashes when they returned to Kansas.

They say they’ll stay in Albuquerque another day, hoping the thieves return the ashes.

“It’s going to be so hard to leave,” Kathy Hunt said. “I just can’t imagine driving away.”