Children were left in tears after realising their toys were missing from their front garden after welcoming trick and treaters this Halloween.
Their mum, Jade Marie Smith-Brain explained how important Halloween is to her family and children, and how the theft left her kids 'heartbroken'.
She told the ECHO: "As my two little ones are now five and six, they're old enough to really understand this year and I wanted to involve them as much as possible in the preparation and celebrations so at the beginning of October, we took them decoration shopping.
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"On one of the shelves they had some adorable rubber ducks styled as spooky characters and the kids loved them immediately so we bought three, brought them home and put them inside on the living room windowsill until the big day.
"At about 5pm, I moved our pumpkins, skeleton, ducks and a couple of other bits outside so that people could see we had decorations up and we were welcoming trick or treaters.
"At around 8pm someone knocked on so I got up to open the door with the treats tub and opened it to see a group of about five teenage girls walking away from the house so I called them back and held out the tub for them to help themselves and that's when I noticed the ducks had disappeared along with two other bits I'd put out with them.
"The following morning was heartbreaking. My children saw that I'd brought the skeleton in and immediately asked me where their ducks were.
"After I told them that a group of big kids had taken them, my five-year-old, who has additional needs, retreated into herself and started crying while my six-year-old begged me to tell her why they had stolen them because she didn't understand and all I could say was "I'm sorry baby, I don't know why"
"I've promised that we'll replace the ducks as soon as we can but I don't know whether that's even possible now that Halloween is over because everywhere will have nothing but Festive stuff. Hopefully I can find something online."
