Their SF wedding photos were stolen. The photographer is going to great lengths to get them back.

Giavanna Acosta and Enzo Mineo planned their special wedding day for more than a year.

Acosta and Mineo settled on July 17, 2017 as the day of their wedding. Acosta selected a beautiful wedding dress, a custom tuxedo was made for Mineo, and they picked special outfits for daughter Daniella, 2, and son Lorenzo, 3.

They had a small ceremony with 20 family members at San Francisco City Hall.

"Most people think of a city hall wedding, they just think of a courthouse wedding, we went all out because I said the only things I'll have at the end of the day are my photos," Acosta told SFGATE. "Something to remember the day by, for the rest of our life."

Family portraits were snapped and, after a memorable lunch reception at 25 Lusk, the last thing the couple was expecting was bad news.

And yet it came: The wedding photos — along with $15,000 in camera equipment — were stolen from the photographer's car in the Presidio that same day.

"This literally was the worst news I could possibly receive, because this was the only thing that mattered out of the whole day: having pictures and memories of the day, Acosta said. "It was just really heartbreaking and devastating, and I can't believe that it happened."

Now, the photographers are going to extraordinary lengths to make it right.

Wedding photographer Amanda Tung and her assistant, Linda Dang, had wrapped up their wedding shoot for Acosta and Mineo after noon on Monday. After shooting photos around Crissy Field for fun in the afternoon, the photographers stopped their car outside of a children's playground in Presidio Park, near the corner of W. Pacific Avenue and Presidio Boulevard, to use the restroom at 6:30 p.m.

By the time Tung and Dang returned to their Honda CR-V 10 minutes later, broken glass on the pavement indicated that everything inside the car was gone.

"I felt like the blood drained from my body — I froze," Tung said of seeing that the equipment and photo memory cards were missing. "Right away, I thought, 'Oh no, the memory cards.' Equipment, we can replace all that, it's just stuff. But that's someone's memories ... it just broke my heart."

Following the break-in, Tung and her assistant spent the next few hours searching trash cans, bushes and dumpsters in the Presidio and its golf course, hoping the thieves had dumped the memory cards ... but no luck. After filing a police report, Tung searched an Oakland flea market the next day, hearing that stolen cameras sometimes turn up at swap meets.

Photographer friends scanned eBay and Craigslist for the stolen items, and Tung and her assistant returned to the Presidio for another day of searching. Dang's iPhone was also stolen from the pair and they turned on the 'Find My iPhone' feature to see if they could locate the phone, but it seemed that the phone's SIM card had been removed. Dang checked every hour to see if the phone would be turned on at some point and become locatable, leaving the thieves a message that would appear on the phone once it is turned on:

"Please just return the memory cards. We'll give you money."

They still haven't heard back.

'Shocked'

Tung was in the unfortunate position of not only having her equipment taken, but also having to break the bad news to the couple about the photos. 

She sent Acosta an email detailing the car break-in after a day of desperate searching, calling the bride immediately after she sent the letter, so they could discuss what happened over the phone. 

Acosta missed the call and listened to Tung's urgent voicemail, before opening up her email to find out what happened, saying she was "shocked" when she read the news.

"All I saw was the word, 'Unfortunately' and my heart just dropped," Acosta said. "I had to read the email about three times to really allow it to sink in ... I almost didn't believe the email when I was reading it."

For now, the couple is holding out hope that a miracle of some sort will happen and that the cameras will be found. Acosta, a registered nurse in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit at John Muir Medical Center, and Enzo, a deputy sheriff for Alameda County, know it's a slim-to-none shot of getting the photos back. In a city that recorded 24,235 vehicle break-ins in 2016, it almost seems impossible.

"I totally feel violated. Like, somebody has the most precious moments for me in my life and of course, it's in the hands of somebody who doesn't care," Acosta said. "I think that, for me, is one of the worst feelings: feeling violated and that somebody stole something that's very personal and valuable to me, and something that is really irreplaceable, [that] I just cannot get back.

"I'm thinking that maybe, by some miracle, this camera will be found and my pictures will be on there," Acosta later added. "I wait by my phone for Amanda to call me with the great news. I'm checking my email every few minutes thinking that hopefully that will happen, but so far, nothing yet."

Take two

To help make up the loss in any way she could, Tung said she isn't charging the couple and has scheduled a reshoot of the family portraits at City Hall for next week. On top of offering to pay for the bride's wedding dress dry cleaning, flowers, makeup artist and hotel room, the photographer is also offering a $1,000 reward to get the memory cards back. Tung described it as the "moral thing to do" for what has happened. Despite the rescheduled portrait session, she and Acosta both acknowledged that it doesn't make up for the missing ceremony photos.

"I just feel ... the pre-ceremony pictures we can re-do, and that's fine: No one's gonna know the difference except us that it wasn't the actual wedding day," Acosta said. "But I think for us, that moment captured in time when we were actually married and said, 'I do,' those pictures are totally irreplaceable and I think that is what I am sort of struggling with, that that is what was lost."

Still, the couple has a few photos from the wedding, shot by family members who attended the ceremony and reception. They're not the real thing, but they'll have to do for now ... unless the photo cards somehow turn up.

"It's just so crazy because we've had so many things go wrong in planning this wedding and then on the wedding day, of course," Acosta said. "It's sort of cliché — we know no wedding day is perfect, and every bride and groom has their hiccups — but you know I had heard a thing once, that 'The worse the wedding, the better the marriage.' I'm sort of chuckling at that and hoping that that's true. So, we laugh and say, 'Yeah, we'll be together for lifetimes to come, if that's the case."

Tung and her photography studio are offering a $1,000 reward in exchange for the photo cards, and plans to post flyers with contact information in the Presidio this week. If anyone has information on the whereabouts of the cards, they can reach her via email at amandablueberrywedding@gmail.com.