The Browning was shopping at a mall in Milan, Italy before a show, and the unthinkable happened – their van got broken into. Everything was stolen for the group, and we really do mean basically everything. Gear, laptops, personal items, hard drives, and essentially everything that makes The Browning able to continue on as a band, was jacked.
The band is currently running a GoFundMe to regain some funds in order to replace all their gear.
“The last thing I want to do is type this right now but, we were robbed while on tour in Italy. The list of things taken is extensive and the cost to replace everything is over $10k, not to mention all of our luggage and clothing. Most heart breaking of all, they have stolen all of our musical equipment. We literally have no way, to play our music live as our show files lived on 3 laptops, and 4 separate external hard drives, all of which were stolen. We have to cancel the rest of our European tour and we have to rebuild our live show from scratch.
The Browning is a 100% self produced band. I create the electronics and write all the songs on my computers, then send the files to Cody (via hard drive), where we mix and master it on his computer. All of our computers, and back up hard drives were taken, and no-one else on the planet has these files. For The Browning to play another show ever again, I will 100% have to recreate all of our songs/electronics from scratch, with a computer, samples, plugins, synths, ect…. that I now do not own. Every single thing I’ve ever created in my life is now gone.
What happened? We got to Milan at around Noon. We didn’t have to be at the venue until 5 pm, so we went to this really nice mall. Parked the van in the parking lot, went inside ate, browsed the mall, was just wasting time till we could load into the venue. Came back out to the van and realized what happened. We immediately called the police and spoke to mall security. They look at the security footage and we clear as day watch the thieves break in to the van by smashing the locks at around 1pm.
Both the police and mall security said they know the people because they had stolen from the mall before. It was people from a gypsy camp nearby. Upon hearing that these thieves were familiar our hopes of recovering our gear rose. We go to the police station. After being at the police station about an hour and filing the report we ask if they’ve sent anyone to go to the gypsy camp and they hadn’t, so we begged them to do that. They sent a few officers, About 40 minutes later they sent a few more and said their boss was talking to the “gypsy boss.”
About an hour later all of the cops come back, and inform us ” they have nothing, we cannot help you.” Even though they knew the suspects, we can all see the people on film that stole everything from us, no-one was arrested, and nothing was recovered. The police would not let us go to the camp with them. So, there is literally nothing we can do about it, the police gave us the police report, and sent us on our way. We were lucky enough that the thieves did a quick run through and left small things, and our passports. But the main damage was done with 100% of our luggage, and electronic gear being taken.
This will be incredibly difficult to recover from. Cody and I both make 100% of our living on the computers that were stolen. Not only did we lose our computers but we lost irreplaceable files and the past 9 years of my life’s work gone, potentially damaging The Browning forever.
However bad it is financially, we won’t let that happen. I will do my best and be hard at work to recreate these songs from scratch once I can afford to get a new computer. I will not let some scumbags take the Browning from us, or our fans.
We have set up a Gofundme. We have never asked for our fans help because it should only be done when completely necessary, and to be completely honest, we NEED your help. The Browning will not let bad things that happen slow us down. It fuels our fire and forces us to push on. We cannot express the gratitude we have for any fan that supports us in any way past, present, and in the future. Thanks for taking the time to read this. Any amount of help even if it’s just moral support helps a ton at times like this. Thanks everyone!
Help spread the word!”
