After Moms and Dads Steal Gifts, Christmas Finally Comes in Chicago
Students from the low-income Cabrini-Green housing project have gotten late Christmas presents to replace gifts looted by a small group of parents.
The replacement gifts were handed out at an assembly Monday at the Friedrick von Schiller School.
“Parents are invited. They are invited to view,” Principal Marshall Taylor said before the assembly.
“But we will not need their assistance on this particular event.”
The 325 students, in the fifth through eighth grades, were to have received donated presents at a special assembly Dec. 23.
But those gifts were looted by some of the 30 parents who had volunteered to help sort and arrange them on the school’s auditorium stage.
During the sorting, parents started unwrapping the gifts and taking what they wanted, and some immediately sold the gifts on the street for as little as $3, Taylor said.
Montgomery Ward & Co. donated some of the replacement presents. Others were sent from Chicagoans and others who heard about the pupils’ plight, with donations coming from as far away as New York, authorities said.
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