"It was kind of a miracle to get something like that back," said Kimberlie Gamino, executive director and founder of Camp Taylor Inc., a Northern California nonprofit that conducts free summer camps for children with heart disease.

The group staged a weeklong camp last month at Camp Mokule'ia to bring Hawai'i children and parents together with 12 older children who have confronted the same challenges.

As the camp was ending last Saturday, someone broke into the lodge and stole two laptop computers, an external hard drive with the photos, a camcorder, three cell phones and other items.

The laptops and two of the phones were returned by a man who said his 17-year-old son had stolen them, Gamino said.

Then on Wednesday, a day after an Advertiser story about the theft, a woman called Gamino to say she had the hard drive and wanted to return it.

Gamino met the woman on the North Shore yesterday morning, with little time to spare before her 2 p.m. flight home.

"I just told her she could turn it in with no questions asked," Gamino said, speaking last night from the Oakland, Calif., airport. She declined to identify the woman, and said they gave her the $150 they had collected for a reward.

"She had read the story in the paper and she just cared that the kids get their photographs back and that she wanted to help," Gamino said.

"We were thrilled. The pictures of the mentors with the younger kids were the ones we didn't want to lose," she said. "Who cares about (photos of) the ocean and turtles and that other stuff? Our goal was the camp for the children and their parents."

Still missing are five hours of video footage, plus a Sony camcorder, a Blackberry, a cell phone and an iPod, Gamino said.