CARMEL, Ind. — Thieves stole fifteen Christmas trees from girl scouts looking to raise money for their troop in Carmel on Saturday.
Girl Scout Troop 1898 sells Christmas trees at the Carmel Lions Club around this time every year to raise money for an annual trip they take and for resources to help the girls work towards their Gold Award, which is the high honor one can earn as a Girl Scout.
“We kind of trust our community when we’re putting them out here and leaving them overnight,” said Caroline Desomiers, who is a member of the troop, to WISH-TV. “It’s kind of a hard thing to steal Christmas trees. We just never though something like this would happen.”
The troop estimates that whoever stole the fifteen trees took cost them $1,200 of profits to use for the trip.
“That is a substantial amount. We were really relying on those resources to take our High Adventure trip to execute the Gold Award,” said troop leader Denise Jensen. “It was a tough 24 hours of, ‘Do we have to cancel?’.”
Jensen posted about the incident on her Facebook page and the next day dozens of Carmel residents showed up to either buy a Christmas tree or to figure out how they can help offset the cost of the stolen trees.
Jill Slevin, decided to come and fittingly buy fifteen trees.
“I was reading the Facebook thread this morning and saw what had happened and the hit that it was going to interfere with their travels and I thought, ‘What better thing can we do to support our community than to go buy 15 trees?”, said Slevin.
The troop has raised around $1,245 so far which is near their goal. To meet their goal they still need to sell the rest of the Christmas trees on their lot.
