SUV containing Boise child’s hearing device was repossessed

A white Chevy SUV taken from a South Boise home a few minutes after midnight on New Year’s Day wasn’t stolen, after all.

Instead, it was repossessed by a Boise car dealership that says the owner never made good on a bounced check used to secure the purchase of the vehicle last summer.

A cochlear implant belonging to Alexandria Music’s 4-year-old daughter Kinsley was still in the vehicle and is being returned to the family, said Patrick Orr, a spokesman for the Ada County Sheriff’s Office.

“I’m thankful they had the decency to give the implant back,” Music said Wednesday morning. “I’m still angry, though, that they took the vehicle.”

Music reported the 2015 Chevy Traverse stolen early Friday morning, after it was taken from the driveway outside the family’s home in the 9500 block of West Jadewood Drive.

Orr said his agency did not learn until Tuesday evening that the vehicle had been repossessed, not stolen.

Idaho law does not require repopossession agents to notify police after they’ve confiscated a vehicle. Some agencies do, Orr said, but it did not happen in this instance.

Kinsley is deaf and was fitted with a cochlear implant, an electronic device that provides signals to the brain to replace the function of a damaged inner ear. The youngster relies on two units attached to her head that receive signals from a speech processor and send them to regions of the auditory nerve.

One of the units, worth tens of thousands of dollars, was left in the vehicle. Without it, Kinsley could not hear.

A manager at the dealership told The Statesman he had been patient with Music in having her repay the amount of the bounced check, plus an additional $1,000 owed on the down payment. He said he had the vehicle repossessed after she denied that she owed any money in response to a small claims court action.

This story was originally published January 6, 2016 at 11:55 AM with the headline "SUV containing Boise child’s hearing device was repossessed."