Hailing Mary’s Return : Police Bring Marble Statue Back to St. Casimir’s 3 Months After Theft

If it was not a miracle, then it was good detective work based on a lucky tip.

Either way, the 700-pound marble statue of the Virgin Mary was put back this week on its pedestal outside St. Casimir’s Lithuanian Roman Catholic Church in Los Feliz--three months after thieves hauled it away in the dead of night.

“Just the idea that it was taken, that’s what bugged me,” said Police Detective Art Placencia, who helped find the 40-year-old statue in a house about a mile away. “It used to be that churches always left their doors open. Now they have to lock the doors and they have to bolt the statues.”

A center of Lithuanian culture and politics in Southern California since World War II, the 1,000-family parish had just about abandoned hope of ever seeing the pure white statue again, according to its pastor, Father Algirdas Olsauskas. “We were looking to buy a new one, a cheaper one made of concrete so no one would take that one too,” he said.

Instead, the church is celebrating the return of the beloved artwork, which depicts a caped Mary, Queen of Peace, her hands folded in prayer. Now bolted to its concrete pedestal as a precaution, the five-foot-high statue once again looms over the intersection of St. George Street and Griffith Park Boulevard across from Marshall High School.

“Everybody’s happy,” said parishioner Vincent Juodvalkis. “It looked awful there without it.”

A neighborhood tipster led police to the Atwater Village house where they found the statue in dirty, but otherwise good condition. No arrests have been made, but investigators are focusing on the Atwater Village woman who says she received the statue as collateral for a $25 loan she made to man she knew only as Ronnie. (Church officials estimate the statue’s value at $5,000.) Detectives also are looking for Ronnie, if he exists.

Neither detectives nor church leaders believe that the theft was related to Baltic politics or any anti-Lithuanian sentiment. “I think someone was just shopping for antiques. It was not terrorism,” Olsauskas said.

Founded by exiles, the church often was involved in protests against the Soviet Union’s 1940 annexation of Lithuania and the other two Baltic nations, Latvia and Estonia. During the past three years of restored Lithuanian independence, St. Casimir’s has been more happily aiding the resurgent Catholic churches in the post-Cold War homeland. Although many Lithuanian American families have moved from the Northeast Los Angeles neighborhoods near the church, many still drive to the parish from suburban homes.

Police suggest that more than two people were involved in the May 13 theft. Because no one in the neighborhood reported hearing the noise of a motorized hoist or crane in the middle of the night, a group of thieves probably took the statue the old-fashioned way--”by brute force,” Placencia said. It took four police officers to carry the statue out of the Revere Avenue house where it was found in a hallway, he added.

Olsauskas asked Placencia and fellow Detective Robert Gonzalez how he could thank them for their help in bringing the Virgin Mary back to St. Casimir’s. They asked him to bless their police badges. He did.