By Snejana Farberov for Mail online For Dave Lacey, it seemed like he lost his wife, Erica, twice: first when she succumbed to a rare form of cancer at the age of 30, and then when a camera containing her final photos was stolen by burglars. The Santa Ana, California, man was devastated when he came home one day in 2012 to find his house ransacked and his valuables gone. But the young widower did not care about his missing Xbox and other items because the thieves had taken his most prized possession of all - his late wife's Canon camera.
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Dave Lacey, from Santa Ana, California, lost his wife, Erica, to aggressive non-Hodgkin lymphoma in 2011
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A year after Erica Lacey's funeral, the couple's home was burglarized and the thieves stole a camera containing photos from her wake and funeral
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David Aguilar and Monica Molina were arrested and pleaded guilty to a series of home invasions in Santa Ana
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Police were able to track down Lacey's camera to a pawn shop and then returned it to the widower with all the photos intact
Erica Werdel-Lacey lost her life to cancer in December 2011, not long after celebrating her 30th birthday with her husband of two years, @placeholder.