The travelling pants: Nanaimo RCMP solve mystery after box falls off truck
Several pairs of tactical trousers, two police media releases and one unfortunate encounter with gravity have brought a Vancouver Island mystery to a swift conclusion.
RCMP vehicles pictured near Nanaimo's waterfront in a file image. The photograph does not show the recovered trousers.
Photo credit: Royal Canadian Mounted Police
NANAIMO — The curious case of Nanaimo's travelling pants has been solved, with police revealing that several pairs of tactical trousers had quite literally fallen off the back of a truck.
The revelation came less than two hours after the Nanaimo RCMP emailed journalists asking for help identifying the pants' rightful owner.
On Wednesday, October 21, the Nanaimo RCMP issued an appeal to the media seeking the owner of several pairs of 5.11 tactical pants discovered in a box in central Nanaimo.
The trousers, still in their original packaging, had been found by a Good Samaritan on October 20 and turned over to police.
Precisely where they were discovered was not disclosed, leaving investigators with a mystery of considerable proportions.
Police asked anyone expecting a shipment of tactical trousers to come forward, provided they could identify the style, colour and size.
The appeal was duly dispatched to the media. And then, approximately one hour and 44 minutes later, came the anticlimactic conclusion.
The Nanaimo RCMP issued a second media advisory, this one triumphantly titled "Mystery of the travelling pants — case closed."
The explanation was considerably less mysterious than the title suggested.
The pants had fallen off a truck.
Barry Hornby, a Community Safety Officer with the City of Nanaimo, contacted police following media coverage of the unusual discovery. The pants belonged to a member of his crew.
According to Hornby, the box had inadvertently been left on one of the crew's work trucks while they responded to a call for service. Somewhere along the route, gravity intervened.
The box tumbled from the vehicle without anyone noticing. The trousers had, quite literally, taken a trip of their own.
Hornby appeared to take the incident in stride.
"As far as the crew is concerned, this is an 'im-pizza-able offence'," he joked in the police release.
Police confirmed the recovered clothing would soon be reunited with its rightful owner and thanked the Good Samaritan whose honesty brought the unusual affair to a successful conclusion.
For the Nanaimo RCMP, file 2026-35238 can now be closed.
For journalists on the police media distribution list, it was an unusually efficient news cycle: an appeal to solve a mystery followed by its resolution before the afternoon was over.
And for whoever left the box on the truck, there is perhaps one important lesson.
When transporting tactical pants, make sure they are secured so they don’t go on a journey of their own.
Case closed. Pants recovered. No further alterations required.
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