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Posted on 12/11/2002 5:00:40 PM PST by vikingchick
Edited on 04/13/2004 3:30:03 AM PDT by Jim Robinson. [history]
Season's greetings, Santa Cruz style: Just a week after a drunken man cut down Christmas lights downtown, two women have swiped the nativity scene from in front of an elder-care home in Live Oak.
The nativity scene was part of an elaborate display in front of Chanticleer Home. It was stolen at 1:24 a.m. Sunday, a time owner Silvio Tufo can state with confidence because it's on the video surveillance tape he turned over to sheriff's investigators.
(Excerpt) Read more at bayarea.com ...
Think Berkeley with a beachfront. It's tragic -- the town and the surrounding areas are drop-dead gorgeous -- but the city is even farther gone than its sister UC university town to the north. I think the reason is because while Berserkely is surrounded by a metropolitan region of several million people, and is under constant (and usually self-inflicted) media scrutiny, Santa Cruz is more isolated and can therefore get away with even more PC nonsense.
By David L. Beck Mercury News
One of the Three Wise Men is somewhat the worse for its journey, but all three, along with plastic representations of Jesus, Mary and Joseph and assorted shepherds and livestock, are back where they began, in the front-lawn manger scene of a Santa Cruz elder-care home.
The two women accused of stealing them are back where they began, too -- that is, out of jail. At least for now.
The beginning of the Wise Men's journey was captured on a surveillance videotape made around 1 a.m. on Dec. 8 at the Chanticleer Home in the Live Oak neighborhood. The tape shows two women loading the Christmas figures into a white cargo van.
The end of their journey was the kitchen of a crowded and untidy two-bedroom apartment about a mile away. Sheriff's spokesman Kim Allyn said a neighbor saw the video on television and recognized the figures she could see through the apartment window.
Bridget Brady, 20, and Jody Walton, 19, turned themselves in after deputies served a search warrant on the Capitola Road apartment. They are now charged with grant theft, according to assistant District Attorney Anastasia Rozinsky. Brady posted bond after her arrest, and Walton was released on her own recognizance Tuesday morning.
Six men arrested at the apartment and accused of possession of stolen property no longer face charges, Rozinsky said.
When deputies served the warrant on the apartment, they found a kitchen with a poster reading ``Death Before Dishes,'' a Christmas tree decorated with beer cans, and on the top of the Christmas tree, the head of a Wise Man.
The headless Magus has its head on again, although Silvio Tufo, owner of the Chanticleer Home, said it was badly battered. All the figures are back in the fenced-in yard, with the kneeling camels, a few plastic deer and an odd assortment of other creatures, including frogs, all of them facing the nativity scene, which lies beneath two walls of a stable with an angel on the roof.
Tufo has had the display for about a decade. When the news broke of the theft, a Santa Cruz man who had a similar set, Jerome Silvia, offered his, which Tufo says was very similar, though it had only one camel. Tufo said he has been unable to contact Silvia to see if he wants his figures back.
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Unfortunately he wasn't there at Christmas time.
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