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The identity of the culprit remains a mystery.
Someone took a chain saw to an oak tree on an empty lot on Newport Avenue in Tampa's Hyde Park, cutting a ring in the bark that likely will lead to the big tree's death.
Neighbors are furious. You don't mess with Hyde Park. People are deadly serious about the neighborhood's historic status.
Like I said, nobody has identified the guilty party. In February, securities lawyer Guy Burns bought the land the oak was on and the big house next door for more than a million dollars.
He was going to sell the land to University of South Florida tennis coach Gigi Fernandez so she could build a home, but neighbors were against it. City officials rejected her plan in September.
Then somebody went after the tree.
Burns says he did nothing to the tree. Whoever did it injected poison into small holes drilled in the top of its roots.
Greater crimes are committed in neighborhoods, crimes not just of the official sort such as stickups and drug sales, but the kind born of the neglect of years. Abandoned cars. Empty lots. Boarded-up houses.
But the crime against the tree on Newport Avenue is of a sort we all can relate to, whether we live in a la-di-da block or not. It spoke of incivility, meanness, a plain old sick spirit. What kind of person would hurt a tree?
The neighbors resisted the house plans because they thought the new house would not fit with the historical, arts-and-crafts or prairie styles around it. They argued that new is not necessarily better than old, that some kinds of change are more violation than improvement.
You can find this way of thinking in many places.
There's another plan for big change circulating in Tampa, at least in some parts. The man behind it, former County Commissioner Ed Turanchik, is the same goofy dreamer who thought we were ready to host the Olympics.
Now his plan - most of it still secret - is to rehabilitate 200 pieces of land in the poorest parts of Tampa.
Using the best weapon, flattery, on the people who have to endorse the plan, he is calling the mayor a visionary and the City Council enlightened. He predicts that big things, as he defines them, are coming. But he hasn't deigned to explain what he thinks of the people who now live in those neighborhoods.
Ruth McNair, president of the West Riverfront Neighborhood Crime Watch Association, complained bitterly about Turanchik when we spoke last week, even though she wasn't sure whether his plans would affect her community.
Still, she sees Turanchik as the bearer of nothing but bad news. She has lived in the same house for 45 years and has no intention of moving under pressure from some developer. She has worked bone-hard for the past year and a half on another plan, generated by neighborhood groups, to rehabilitate her part of Tampa.
Like the people in Hyde Park, she wants a kind of new that doesn't destroy the old, but respects it. That might help explain why McNair wants to go take a look at the damaged tree on Newport Avenue.
She has a big oak in front of her house. It makes all the difference to the feel of her property. Without that tree, she said, her place would be mighty hot.
Years ago, on Central Avenue, Tampa bulldozed its entire black business district. It plowed under the homes of Ybor City to make way for the interstate. Now when people go looking for their memories, they must focus only on their mind's eye. Even the trees are gone.
And yet you'll find them elsewhere, in parts of town that don't have Hyde Park's profile. Sulfur Springs. Riverview Terrace. Along the Hillsborough riverfront. The oaks are thick-trunked, shady, rustling. You know this city by knowing its trees. You love this city by respecting them.
Burns says he is not likely to live in the house he bought in Hyde Park. He and his wife have been soured by the uproar. He even is having an arborist come out next week to see whether the poisoned tree can be saved.
- Mary Jo Melone can be reached at mjmelone@sptimes.com or 226-3402.