In the early afternoon on New Year’s Eve, Santa Clarita resident Amy Miller-Wieczorek happened to come back from work at about the same time as her husband, Bryant Wieczorek.
What had happened to their home in Valencia is a crime that’s seen a significant decrease locally – by nearly 23% year over year, as of November – but has still affected hundreds of homes and stores in Santa Clarita.
“It had been completely ransacked. They’d broken our back door,” Miller-Wieczorek said.
Sometime between about 9 a.m. and 2 p.m., burglars made off with some designer items, including jewelry and sunglasses, and $500 in cash.
One piece of jewelry that had been stolen was distinct: an emerald and diamond ring that Miller-Wieczorek’s dad Terry Miller, who died in a motorcycle accident in 2005, had given to her when she was a teenager. The Terry Miller Memorial Park sits near the northwestern border of Santa Clarita, off of Copper Hill Drive near Rio Norte Junior High School.
Miller-Wieczorek’s father-in-law had also paid for the ring to be reset when the fit changed – he died from COVID-19 in 2021. In honor of the two of them, Miller-Wieczorek had called it her “dad ring.”
It’d been removed from a drawer that also held a small amount of her dad’s ashes.
“It’s really special. It’s the only thing I have from my father jewelry-wise,” Miller-Wieczorek said. “(But) it’s obviously something that only means something to me.”
Miller-Wieczorek said that she’s grateful that, of all possible outcomes, the situation wasn’t worse – her son Kaiden Escobar, a 23-year-old EMT, wasn’t at home at the time, and her two pets, a cat named Kiki and a cocker spaniel-poodle mix named Lucy, were unharmed.
Only one couch in the home had been left untouched after the break-in. Miller-Wieczorek said she suspected that was Lucy’s doing.
“We know (Lucy), and she was probably standing on that couch barking at them the entire time,” Miller-Wieczorek said.
Miller-Wieczorek said she’s hoping that, if anything that was taken that day can come back to her, it’s the ring.
Sheriff’s deputies took photos soon after the incident, and fingerprints were taken from the scene the next day. But other variables make the chances of turning up an eyewitness especially thin: In a neighborhood where people are typically outside and walking around, the heavy rain that day had driven everyone indoors, Miller-Wieczorek said.
None of their neighbors’ cameras captured footage of the break-in.
Sergio Camberos, a detective with the Santa Clarita Valley Sheriff’s Station, wasn’t able to say how often items stolen during home burglaries are recovered.
Investigators, and Miller-Wieczorek, are hoping for success with one possible method of recovering the ring. When items like high-value jewelry are stolen, the sheriff’s station has a system in place to identify them if they make their way into a pawn shop, Camberos said.
“We have a pawn specialist who reviews over the pawn system … a pawn worker is supposed to report the items,” Camberos said. “Of course, sometimes they can not report things, but that is one resource that we do use.”
If not, other factors make catching the perpetrators unlikely. Camberos said that burglars typically don’t focus on one area, and are sometimes apprehended a distance away from where the theft occurred.
Miller-Wieczorek said that, in any case, her biggest concern is the ring itself.
“Take everything else — that’s just the only thing we want back,” Miller-Wieczorek said.
