A 75-year-old woman in East L.A. thought she was helping out a stranger. Instead, her family says, thieves drove off with a gold necklace that was priceless to her because it carried the ashes of her late daughter.
“She was crying hysterically, saying, ‘They stole my chain, they stole my chain!’” said Jesse Guerrero, 57, the woman’s son.
The incident occurred on Dec. 15 after the woman and her husband returned to their home in the 300 block of Gerhart Avenue following a shopping trip to downtown L.A.
His mother, Esther Guerrero, had just stopped to let her husband out and was making her way to the back of her Ford Explorer to grab her bags when she noticed a white car drive past and then reverse back toward her SUV.
Jesse Guerrero said the people in the white car called his mother over and said, “My mom’s really sick, do you know if there’s a pharmacy nearby?”
Guerrero’s mom walked toward the window of the car to give them directions. Inside she saw two women and a young child, he said. She also noticed a knife near the center console and decided to move away from the car.
But Guerrero said a woman who was sitting in the backseat kept talking to his mom and got out of the car, saying she wanted to thank her for the directions.
He said the woman offered his mother money.
“My mom, she tried to push her away and said, ‘No, I don’t need anything,’” Guerrero said.
But the woman insisted, offered to give his mom a chain and tried to put it around her neck. Guerrero said his mother resisted and refused the chain. The woman then hugged his mother.
At some point, Guerrero said, the woman took his mother’s gold necklace and golden cross from her and left a cheap chain hanging around her neck. The woman hurried back inside the car and drove away.
His mother said that “as they sped away, she noticed it was gone,” Guerreo said.
Jesse Guerrero lives across the street from his parents and said he was driving north on Gerhart Avenue soon after the theft when he saw his mother on the street, crying.
It wasn’t the lost necklace that sparked her despair, he said, but the gold cross, which carried the ashes of Esther Guerrero’s daughter.
Veronika Garcia, a retired deputy with the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, died on May 3 in a car crash in Idaho. After her death, Jesse Guerrero said, Garcia’s husband gifted her parents with two identical gold necklaces with a cross.
The golden cross has two distinct wings making up the horizontal part of the cross, he said, and carry some of Garcia’s ashes inside.
He said his mother had worn and kept that cross with her since it was gifted to her.
His mother told him the white car, which appeared to be an Audi, drove toward Beverly Boulevard. Guerrero continued to drive, looking for the car, but was unable to locate it.
He’s driven around the area these past days with his mother, hoping to recognize the women who took the cross from her. Guerrero also has visited pawnshops, hoping to find it.
In the past week, he said, he and his siblings have been trying to keep his mother busy with Christmas preparations. She’s been heartbroken by the theft, he said, and they’re trying to keep her from dwelling on it.
Detectives with the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department have been assigned to the case, and Guerrero said he’d also reached out to other police departments about similar incidents. Still, they’ve had no luck.
Now, he said, he and his family are making a public plea and asking the people who took the necklace to return the cross because of its sentimental value.
“We’re hoping they throw it on the grass, toss it on the porch, or put it in the mailbox, whatever it is,” he said. “As my mom said — ‘All I need is the cross, forget the chain. I just need the cross.’”
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