Youth Shelter Burglary Puts Chill on Christmas Plans

Even the Grinch wasn’t this cold.

When Marilyn Dungan-Gould heard $1,000 worth of food and toys had vanished earlier this week from her shelter for troubled youth, she felt a chill.

The poor had just gotten poorer.

Workers at the Bridge in North Park, a transitional home for 12- to 17-year-old delinquent and homeless youth, discovered the loss Thursday morning while picking up meal supplies. The infrequently used storage room is in a converted garage at 3160 Redwood St. about a mile from the shelter’s temporary quarters.

Christmas gifts and food stocked to last until the New Year were stolen sometime within the past week, San Diego police said. Among the goods taken in the heist: children’s backpacks, radios, stuffed toy animals, frozen chicken, pork sausage, ground beef, 40 pounds of cheese and about 3 dozen large cans of fruit, Detective Tom Gast said.

Left behind were three of the seven turkeys that were in the freezer.

“My guess is they took what they could carry and were going to come back for the rest,” said Linda Nelson, program director for San Diego Youth and Community Services, which has operated the Bridge and another shelter, the Gatehouse in El Cajon, for 21 years.

Little is known about the thief or thieves, detectives said, other than that one was probably a man wearing the size 13 sneaker that left a print where the door was kicked in.

Police speculated it was done by one man, who might be homeless and living in the canyon next to the garage. It is the same area where 9-year-old Amanda Gaeke’s body was found after she disappeared, Gast said.

“The chances of retrieving the items and determining who took them is very slim,” Gast said. “Besides the size of this guy’s foot, there’s really not a lot to go on.”

Social workers thought more than one person was involved, because of the weight of the goods and the difficulty of carting them off, Dungan-Gould said. The workers, too, suspected the homeless in the canyon.

The probable scenario--the poor stealing from the poor--seems a sign of the times, Dungan-Gould said, one that may continue to dog the city as social services are pinched by a beleaguered economy.

The shelter is a United Way agency and receives federal and county grants. The operating budget was about $360,000 last year, which paid for staff salaries, rent, and room and board for about 200 children and their families throughout the year.

Workers at the Bridge are trying to shield their six current charges from news of the theft. They are young people struggling to come to terms with abusive parents, drug addictions and run-ins with the law. To make them go through another hardship wouldn’t be fair, Gould-Dungan said.