After her daughter’s ashes necklace was stolen, LA mother pleads with the thieves
A 75-year-old woman in East LA thought she was helping a stranger. Instead, her family says the thieves left with a gold necklace that was precious to her because it carried the ashes of her late daughter.
“She was crying loudly, saying, ‘They stole my chain, they stole my chain!'” said Jesse Guerrero, 57, the woman’s son.
The incident occurred on December 15 after Esther Guerrero and her husband returned to their home in the 300 block of Gerhart Avenue after a shopping trip to downtown LA.
Guerrero had just stopped to let her husband out and was looking in the back of her Ford Explorer to get her bags when she saw a white car drive by and reverse back towards her SUV.
Esther Guerrero holds a photo of her late daughter, Veronika Garcia, a retired Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department deputy who died May 3 in a car accident in Idaho.
(KTLA)
Jesse Guerrero said the people in the white car called his mother and said, “My mother is really sick, do you know if there is a pharmacy nearby?”
Guerrero’s mother went to the car window to give them a way. Inside he saw two women and a small child, he said. He also saw a knife near the center console and decided to walk away from the car.
But Guerrero said the woman sitting in the back seat kept talking to her mother and got out of the car, saying she wanted to thank her in a way.
He said the woman gave money to her mother.
“My mother, she tried to push him away and said, ‘No, I don’t need anything,'” said Guerrero.
But the woman persisted, promised to give her mother a chain and tried to put it around her neck. Guerrero said his mother resisted and refused the chain. The woman then hugged her mother.
At one point, Guerrero said, the woman took her mother’s gold necklace and gold cross from her and left a cheap chain hanging around her neck. The woman rushed back to the car and hit it.
His mother said “when they were speeding, she saw it was gone,” Guerrero said.
Jesse Guerrero lives across the street from his parents and said he was driving north on Gerhart Avenue shortly after the robbery when he saw his mother in the street, crying.
It wasn’t the missing necklace that made her despair, she said, but the golden cross, which carried the ashes of Esther Guerrero’s daughter.
Veronika Garcia, a retired deputy with the County Sheriff’s Department, died on May 3 in a car accident in Idaho. After her death, Jesse Guerrero said, Garcia’s husband gave her parents two gold necklaces that resembled a cross.
The golden cross has two separate wings that make up its horizontal section, he said, and carries Garcia’s ashes inside.
He said his mother has always worn it and kept that cross with him since he gave it to us.
His mother told him that a white car, which appeared to be an Audi, was headed toward Beverly Boulevard. Guerrero continued to drive, looking for the car, but could not find it.
He has wandered around this place in recent days with his mother, hoping to see women who take up the cross from him. Guerrero also visited pawn shops, hoping to find one.
He said last week he and his siblings were trying to keep their mother busy with Christmas preparations. His heart aches for stealing, he says, and they try to stop him from focusing on it.
Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department detectives were assigned the case, and Guerrero said he has also contacted other police departments about similar incidents. However, they had no luck.
Now, he said, he and his family are making a public appeal and asking the people who took the necklace to return the cross.
“We’re hoping they’ll throw it on the lawn, throw it on the porch, or put it in the mailbox, whatever it is,” he said. “As my mother said – ‘What I need is a cross, forget the chain. I just need a cross.’
