Thieves slink off with toys for kids

More than $15,000 worth of holiday gifts are stolen or destroyed. It took several months and numerous donations to buy them.

[Times photo: John Pendygraft] Cindy Sawyer stands in the trailer next to her eastern Hillsborough home, where the Foster Angel Program gifts were stored.

By TAMARA LUSH
© St. Petersburg Times,
published November 14, 2001

TAMPA -- Like a Grinch in the night, thieves have stolen the Christmas presents set aside this year for hundreds of foster children.

More than $15,000 worth of skateboards, inline skates, CD players, baseball gloves and televisions were stolen from a storage trailer on Monday.

How to help Anyone wanting to help the Foster Angel program can call the Children's Board of Hillsborough County at (813) 229-2884. Checks can be made out to the Foster Angel Program and sent to 1205 E Eighth Ave., Tampa, 33605.

All were intended as Christmas gifts for teenagers living in foster homes.

"When I saw it, I was ready to cry and I'm 66 years old," said Mac MacNeel Sr., the executive director of the Foster Angel Program, a nonprofit group that donates toys and gifts to foster children during the holidays. "How could anybody do that to kids? Especially foster kids?"

Last year, the Foster Angel Program donated presents to 1,970 kids in Hillsborough County, said MacNeel. This year, he said, it's questionable whether it will be able to give to nearly as many.

The presents were amassed over several months with donated money. MacNeel and other volunteers would purchase the gifts at auctions, sales and discount stores. Some of the presents also were donated by companies.

Whoever stole the presents took only the ones intended for teens, MacNeel said. The thieves left the toys for smaller children, such as stuffed animals, intact. But they ripped and destroyed several articles of donated clothing.

"They went through everything," MacNeel said. "They literally trashed the place."

The unwrapped presents were housed in a storage trailer on the property of Cindy Sawyer, a Foster Angel board member. The trailer and Sawyer's home are on 5 acres in Dover in eastern Hillsborough.

On Monday afternoon, Sawyer and her husband discovered that someone had cut the fence around the trailer and hacked off the trailer's padlock.

They called sheriff's deputies and tried to remember who knew what was inside the trailer. Sawyer said that volunteers go in and out of the trailer often to drop off donations.

"It's a sickening feeling," Sawyer said. "We're wondering why and who and for what reasons.

"Who in the world would not have a heart?"

-- Tamara Lush can be reached at 813-226-3373 or lush@sptimes.com.

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