WHAT?! Thieves pull up, steal live Christmas tree from woman's front yard

FREDERICKSON, Wash. -- A Pierce County woman is still in disbelief over the thieves who came to her house last week. All they stole was a Christmas tree -- one that was still growing in her yard!

“They drove over this tree and came here,” Stephanie Podzus said Tuesday as she showed what happened outside her Frederickson home. “I think they just pulled it because of the way it looks.”

When she was getting her mail the other day, she noticed a hole in her front yard. Someone had taken a Douglas fir, believed to be about 4 feet tall, right out of the ground.

“They had to have pulled it or dug it out, because they're deep in there. It wasn't easy at all.”



Podzus has a security system. She's going through the footage, to see if the thieves were caught on camera.

“You hear all the time about people stealing packages, I’ve been careful about that,” she said. “I didn't think I had to watch my trees.”

Podzus said the trees mean a lot to her family, because they remind them of her late stepfather. He had always gotten the family Christmas tree.

“A couple years after he died, these just planted themselves in the yard. So my son believed they were a gift from his grandpa.”

She said it hasn`t been easy explaining to her son that thieves took one of the trees.

“He’s kind of upset about it,” she said. “Even though we have more, they were all really special to him.”

She wants to believe that whoever took the tree couldn`t afford to get one for their family any other way.

“But if they would have asked, I would have given it to them. They didn't have to steal it.”