Darwin man Lenny Brown has weekend with Bernie after mystery box find on roadside

A bizarre find on the side of the road led to a Palmerston man making a new friend of a very different kind. Read how his life turned into a movie plot.

Palmerston man Lenny Brown said he ‘thought stuff like this happened only in Ireland’.

A Palmerston man has had his very own weekend with Bernie after making a surprise discovery on the way home from work last week.

Lenny Brown said he was driving home last Friday when he noticed an unusual box on the side of the road on Owston Ave in Bellamack.

“I drove past and I thought ‘Oh jiggers that didn’t move, there might be something in it’.” he said.

“So I went to move it off the road in case there was an accident and ‘Oh sugar, there’s something in this’, turned it over and it was from the cemetery.”

Palmerston man Lenny Brown found a box of human ashes on the side of the road in Bellamack.

Inside the box were the ashen remains of a mystery man whose name Mr Brown didn’t recognise, so with the Thorak Regional Cemetary offices already closed for the weekend, he took it to the nearest police station the following day.

“So I’ve got the box under my arm, walked in and sat him on the counter but put my arm over the cemetery (logo) so they didn’t know what it was,” he said.

“It was two police women who came over to the screen, ‘Can I help you’ and I said ‘Maybe not so much me but my mate’ and she says ‘Who’s he?’.”

Deciding to have some fun with the unusual situation, the 62-year-old Irish national revealed only that he “picked him up from the side of the road”.

“Doesn’t know where he’s come from, where he’s going and he sat in my ute all night, he hasn’t had a bite, he hasn’t had a thing to drink, he hasn’t said a word, he’s done nothing, a perfect gentleman,” he said.

“They said ‘Well where has he come from? Do you know his name?’ and I said ‘Aye, I do’, hang on I’ll give you his name.

“And that’s when I lifted my arm off and tilted it over and his name was inside the box and she said ‘Now you tell me that this isn’t for real’ and I said ‘Yes, it is’.

“She said ‘What are you going to do with him?’ and I said ‘I’m going to give him to you’.”

The officers told Mr Brown the ashes were a biohazard so they weren’t allowed to take them but agreed to do some online sleuthing to try to track down the man’s relatives.

“They couldn’t find anybody so they said to me ‘Look can you take him with you, we can’t take him, can you hold onto him?’.

“They said ‘Look, we’ll give you a wee phone and let you know if we’ve caught up with anybody that belongs to him’, so about an hour later the phone rang and it was the police.

“They said ‘Lenny we’ve got bad news for you, we haven’t (found anyone), you’re going to have to keep him’.”

After spending the weekend with his “new best mate”, Mr Brown said the cemetery contacted him on Monday and agreed to take the ashes off his hands to try to track down their loved ones.

“I was thinking somebody was maybe moving house or something and they packed the trailer and sat the ashes maybe on the boot or something like that and they got in and took off and haven’t even noticed,” he said.

“She said ‘When I do, I’ll let you know’ and they haven’t rang me so they mustn’t have found his owners.”