Brazen thieves – the “Grinches that they are” – stole handmade standup Christmas lawn ornaments from the front yard of a home in Stevenson Ranch, leaving a woman and her three sons disheartened, sad and angry.
Michele Tomlin and her three boys made the wooden four-foot ornaments as a family Christmas project three years ago and every year since then, displayed them proudly for their neighborhood on Webster Place.
Danny, Joey and Casey were 18, 16 and 13 when, shoulder to shoulder, they crafted characters of the popular SpongeBob SquarePants TV show out of household materials.
“Patrick was wearing a Santa hat, Squidward was in a Santa suit. They were all done in a Christmas theme,” Tomlin said.
“My son came home early and he noticed they were gone,” she said.
“He asked me ‘Did you bring the characters in?’ and I told him ‘no.’ And, he said ‘They’re not out front.’”
“I was so mad to hear that someone had stolen them,” Tomlin said. “Well, I was more upset than mad because of what they meant to me and the boys.”
Tomlin called the thieves Grinches in reference to the popular Christmas story by Dr. Seuss, How The Grinch Stole Christmas.
Her oldest son, Danny, a Down Syndrome man now 22, can’t understand why the characters are now gone, his mother said.
“All my boys, they’re really upset,” Tomlin said. “And, Danny doesn’t understand.”
The thieves took standup ornaments of Patrick, Gary and Plankton. They left Squidward which was the very first ornament the Tomlin family created.
“Maybe they left it because Squidward’s hand is broken,” Tomlin said, reflecting on the possibility that thieves intended to sell the items on eBay.
“If that’s the case, someone could unknowingly purchase it,” she said.
The character of Sponge Bob is the family’s work-in-progress this Christmas, she said.
Asked what message she has for the thieves, Tomlin said” “Karma comes around. They’ll get their’s, Grinches that they are.”
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