LAS VEGAS – A brazen thief who offered condolences at a memorial service made off with $10,000 collected for the family of an ironworker killed in a Las Vegas Strip construction site mishap, friends and family members said.
Las Vegas police were searching for the suspect after the Sunday night theft marred the service for 30-year-old David Rabun.
Officer Martin Wright described the man as a white male in his 30s who was approximately 5 feet 6 inches tall, with blond hair and blue eyes. He was wearing a red T-shirt, black jacket and blue jeans at the time.
"I hope the ironworkers don't find him first," Ruth Brown, Rabun's grandmother, told the Las Vegas Review-Journal. She traveled to Las Vegas from New Orleans to attend the service.
None of Rabun's family knew the man who went to a microphone and told mourners he didn't work with Rabun often but wanted to express his condolences, Sandra Alton, Rabun's mother, told the paper.
At some point, the man snatched of a bag full of photos, cash, checks, a toy for Rabun's 4-year-old son, cards and a Bible and left the funeral home, Jesse Alton, Rabun's sister, told the paper.
"He looked like an ironworker type of guy, a little rough but not homeless," she said.
Several mourners searched the area and recovered the bag with some of the items. The money, estimated at $10,000, was gone, family members said.
Rabun, a member of Ironworkers Local 433, died Tuesday when he fell about 50 feet during a mishap while attaching a steel beam to an upper floor the Cosmopolitan high-rise site.
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