The sign from Cariboo Jade and Gifts which disappeared following a jade heist last year, was finally found along Highway 1.

Image Credit: FACEBOOK/Cariboo Jade & Gifts

Nearly a year after a 2,850-pound piece of jade was stolen from a Cache Creek gift shop, the owners have located the last missing piece — the sign that has long accompanied it.

On Dec. 19, 2020, the gem, all five-feet-three-inches of it was stolen from outside of the Cariboo Jade and Gift Shop, where it stood since 1987. It was found days later but wasn't returned to the store until it was refinished and the store owners decided where it would be placed again in June.

READ MORE: B.C. RCMP identify two suspects in theft of jade boulder

Manager Heidi Roy said this week she received a tip that a sign accompanying the giant jade piece was spotted in a ditch between Savona and Kamloops along Highway 1.

Roy found it before the snow hit.

“It was kind of a conclusion of the whole saga. That was the last piece, we sort of wondered what happened to it,” she said. “It’s a little strange because I mean we go to Kamloops regularly and so do all the locals and nobody spotted it before this time so I don’t know if it was recently put there or someone flipped it over.”

The RCMP presented evidence to Crown Counsel, but they did not feel it was worth pursuing charges, Roy said. A witness had reported that while following the alleged thieves, a rock was thrown at his truck.

"It's nice to have closure or a conclusion having all the pieces back. It would have been nice... to have some consequences for the action of the person who stole it, not necessarily of the theft itself but when they threw a rock through the windshield, that could have been disastrous," Roy said. 

The jade has been placed inside the store this time, with the sign propped against it. Its location before the robbery was outside of the store to draw tourists to order to provide insight into the mining process, she said.

She says the slab was mined in the Dease Lake area of northern B.C. and brought to Lillooet before her father acquired it in the mid-1980s for the Cache Creek shop, where it's been on display ever since.

Since the heist, it’s become even more popular, she said.

“People who have read the saga of it, really want to stop and see it in real life so it’s definitely brought more fame to it, for sure.”

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