By Spencer Sterritt

Local icon finds himself in a jam after robbery

Feb 11, 2016 | 11:00 AM

Northcote Manor resident Charlie Squire, otherwise known around Prince Albert as “The Jam Man,” was soundly asleep in his living room chair when he was robbed on Sunday, Feb. 7.

He said while he was asleep, tired from a long day of helping a friend, a woman entered his apartment and stole nearly $400 worth of cash from beside his chair.

“To be robbed like that, it shatters me,” Squire said. He has been helping charities such as Telemiracle for years by selling delicious homemade jams.

He had left his apartment door open to cool off his apartment. He said he’d been awoken by the woman who robbed him when she called into his apartment from the doorway, after she had allegedly already taken his money.

“She wanted more,” Squire said, explaining why the woman would have robbed him and then stayed at the scene to wake him and ask for jam.

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He obliged her request, getting up and collecting jam from the numerous boxes of jam in his bedroom. While he was in the bedroom, he said the woman continually bumped into him. “I couldn’t figure out why she bumped into me,” Squire said. “Now I know it’s because that’s when she stole my pocketbook!”

The woman left $10 for the jam before she left. Squire realized he’d been robbed when he went to put the $10 in his pocket, and found the rest of his money gone.

“How can one man be so stupid?” he asked with a chuckle. “I assure you, before I sit down with a glass of milk and piece of toast (at night), I’ll have that chain on the door.”

Besides the theft of his money, which was to be donated to Telemiracle, Squire is most concerned about how the woman entered Northcote Manor.

“We have hard of hearing people, grandmas and grandpas, and in my experiences we’ve had young people here call up and say ‘hi grandma, it’s me’ and they get let up.” Squire said it’s been a concern since the building was opened.

A camera is at the entrance to Northcote Manor, but it’s only a live feed and doesn’t record who comes and goes from the building.

Dave Deobald, general manager of the Prince Albert Housing Authority, said it’s not recorded because incidents are rare.

“There would be none at all if people didn’t let strangers in,” he said.

The jam man didn’t name names, but said he had contacted someone he thought knew the woman who’d robbed him. “I believe I’ve seen her come into the building one time or another,” he said.

Squire said one of the strangest aspects of the incident was the present left on his table by the woman who supposedly robbed him.

“Before she left, she left me a cookie. She said she’d baked them that day. I didn’t eat the cookie, I’m a little smarter now.”

ssterritt@jpbg.ca

On Twitter: @spencer_sterrit