Farrell: Storied Jaguar leads to recovery of stolen guitar on Hilton Head Island

In 2011, one year after his wife of nearly 50 years died and a year before his own death, Edward Lawson III of Hilton Head Island decided to go on a road trip.

First, he bought a 2008 silver Jaguar XJ8 Vanden Plas, a dignified but speedy car that would, along with a stack of paper maps, serve as his highway companion as he toured all 48 contiguous United States.

Then, when he had driven far enough away from home to be undeniably and irreversibly on a journey, he took out his flip-phone and called his son.

“Guess where I am?” he asked Eric Lawson, who lived in Boston at the time.

“Where?”

“South Dakota.”

“Why are you in South Dakota, Dad?”

“I’ve never been to South Dakota before so I wanted to go to South Dakota. Guess how fast I’m driving?”

“How fast?”

“110 miles per hour.”

“Dad. You’re 82. And you’re talking on a phone while you’re driving! You shouldn’t be going 110,” Eric told him.

“Well,” Edward said, “I was going 120 for a while. It’s just me and a couple of buffalo out here so suddenly 110 miles per hour felt really normal.”

Edward Lawson drove 8,000 miles in that Jaguar.

He traveled up and down the East and West coasts and he visited most of the national parks. He ventured to the farthest Eastern point in the country so he could be the first person in the United States to see the sun rise.

And he planned to spend his birthday in Texas, only he drove across the state so quickly that he ended up celebrating his day in New Orleans.

After he returned to Hilton Head to start dialysis, an inevitability that led to the road trip in the first place, he had two heart attacks in two months.

Both times he drove himself to the hospital in that Jaguar.

He walked in through those emergency room doors on his own, and when he was safely within reach of the surgeons who would save his life, only then did he collapse.

“That was the tough generation,” his son said Wednesday.

“Never,” Eric Lawson said, “would (my father) have thought any kind of man would steal a guitar in his car.”

THE NIGHT OF THE GUITAR

Nearly two weeks ago, Edward Lawson’s silver Jaguar was the inadvertent getaway car for a man now charged with stealing a rare guitar and a painting from singer/songwriter Donavon Frankenreiter, who was in town performing at The Rooftop Bar at Poseidon in Shelter Cove.

Eric Lawson, now of Hilton Head and an occasional Uber driver, inherited his father’s car and for the past few months has been using it to ferry tourists and residents to area hotspots on nights and weekends via the app-based taxi network.

On March 20 around 9 p.m., he was pinged to pick up what ended up being a group of 20-somethings who wanted to go to The Rooftop Bar at Poseidon.

A few hours later that night he was coincidentally pinged again by a member of this same group.

But there were two additional passengers this time: the guitar and the painting.

The guitar, a white left-handed Fender Stratocaster fitted for right-handed play, was valued at $20,000. And the painting, a caricature created for Frankenreiter by local artist Travis Harper and gifted to the singer by a fan, was valued at $1,000.

Video surveillance from The Rooftop Bar at Poseidon showed a man taking the guitar. It also showed the car he left in. The restaurant posted these screenshots on its Facebook page and pleaded with fans to help locate the guitar.

A furious Frankenreiter took to his Instagram page to wish darkness on the thief: “This guy ripped out a bit of my (soul) last night,” he wrote in a profanity-laced tirade after the show. “... Let’s get this guy.”

Staff at Poseidon recognized the silver Jaguar driven by “The Uber Guy,” a familiar face at the restaurant’s curb.

The next day a Beaufort County Sheriff’s Office detective showed up at Eric Lawson’s home, and Lawson knew instantly it had to be about that group and that mysterious guitar and painting.

When Lawson had arrived at the restaurant the night before, he got out of the car and asked one of the female passengers whom he recognized from before, “Where is everybody?”

She didn’t know.

A second female then came over and asked Lawson to pull around the corner. He thought it was odd, but did so nonetheless. This short and strange move is what ended up leading to the recovery of the guitar.

Lawson pulled around the corner, as he was asked to do, which put the car in full view of the restaurant’s surveillance camera. Something, I’m sure, the thief didn’t think about.

Two young men joined the group. One had the guitar and painting with him.

“Can you pop the trunk?” one of them asked Lawson.

Lawson got out of the car because he didn’t want anyone slamming the lid to his trunk.

“Whose guitar is this?” Lawson asked when he saw the brown-case in the back of his car.

“It’s his,” one of the young men said pointing toward the other.

Lawson thought something wasn’t right, but didn’t press further. Maybe they were friends with the band? Or roadies?

“I could not have imagined that they had stolen a guitar,” he said.

One member of the group wanted to go to the Triangle after Poseidon, but the others wanted to get food and to go home. Lawson took them to the diner, but they didn’t stay. Then he took them to McDonald’s, but it was closed. Finally, they hit up a gas station for candy and sodas. After that, he dropped them off at a mid-island home and that was that.

“There seemed to be a little uneasiness,” he said of the group, but otherwise conversation was normal.

The next day at his door, the detective showed Lawson the surveillance footage from the night before.

“These kids aren’t rocket scientists, are they?,” Lawson joked with him.

One person was charged in the theft.

Michael Triarsi, 24, of New York flew back to Beaufort County and turned himself in two days after the theft.

“ARE YOU ‘THAT’ SILVER JAGUAR?”

Since that night, Lawson has given about 100 rides to spring-breakers and older folks who are smart enough to avoid a DUI. Each day he is asked “Are you the silver Jaguar from the newspaper?”

“I kind of wonder when they ask,” he said, “are they asking because they think it was cool that it was helpful in solving this situation for Mr. Frankenreiter? Or are they asking because they are implicating me? Or do they not want to be in this car?”

Soon after his passengers are settled, though, he knows it’s just curiosity and shock that something like this would happen to a nationally known act on such a small island.

“They say ‘Can you believe that they did that? That’s so mean that they would steal a musician’s guitar.’ And ‘How lame!’”

One passenger ran back inside his home after Lawson arrived so that he could clip the newspaper story of the stolen guitar for him.

Ninety percent of the passengers Lawson drives around the island are really nice, he said.

“The guitar people?,” he said when I asked him. “Hmmm. What can I say about them?”

Finally he has some words.

“They were just being little jerks. They were just little twerps. It was a real drag.”

His father, he thinks, though, would’ve gotten a big hoot out of knowing his car led to the recovery of a stolen guitar.

“He would’ve enjoyed this story,” Lawson said quietly. “Yeah.”

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This story was originally published March 30, 2016 at 5:24 PM with the headline "Farrell: Storied Jaguar leads to recovery of stolen guitar on Hilton Head Island."