Santa Clarita / Antelope Valley : Vandalism Fells Community Holiday Tree : Santa Clarita: Workers are forced to cut down the Christmas spruce after it is sawed at the base. It was the site of the city’s Yuletide public lighting ceremony.

Volunteers spent months searching the state for a community Christmas tree. It took a year of nursing for the fragile transplant to survive. Donors gave tens of thousands of dollars to sponsor decorations. Hundreds turned out annually for the Christmas lighting ceremony.

Now, thanks to a vandal with a saw, the community Christmas tree is gone.

Workers who went to take down the ornaments from the 25-foot blue spruce Thursday at Henry Mayo Newhall Memorial Hospital discovered three-fourths of the trunk had been sawed through near the base. Crews were left with no choice but to finish cutting down the tree during the weekend.

“It was a very, very healthy tree, (but) we had some landscaping people look at it and they couldn’t save it,” said Clyde Eller, a hospital guard. Eller said it appeared the tree was cut with either a chain saw or a crosscut saw.

Authorities have no suspects.

The tree stood near the entrance to the hospital on McBean Parkway, one of the city’s main thoroughfares. It was the site of the city’s only public Christmas tree-lighting ceremony.

“I know it sounds silly, but it had its own personality,” said Carol Maglione, director of community programs for the Newhall Land & Farming Co., which co-sponsored the lighting ceremony with the hospital. “The trunk kind of curved, and we had a number of volunteers in the community involved in the lighting ceremony.”

The tree has been at the hospital since 1989, Maglione said. She said that may not seem like a long time, but it outlasted two other trees that failed to survive transplanting.

“It’s real tricky to find a tree that is going to survive,” she said. “You want a tree large enough to work in the kind of program we have there, but you can’t have a tree too large because its roots won’t survive the transplant.”

Organizers spent several months searching throughout the state for the right tree before finding an ideal specimen--just down the street from the hospital near College of the Canyons, Maglione said. It took four weeks to box the tree and transfer it to the hospital.

About $20,000 was raised last Christmas from people who sponsored one of several hundred ornaments or a light among the 40 strands that decorated the tree, authorities said. The money will be used for patient care services at the hospital.

The tree will be replaced, but the search for a new one has yet to begin, Maglione said. Many are still mourning the passing of the old.

“It just makes no sense at all,” she said. “It’s kind of come to symbolize the resiliency of the community. That’s why I can’t understand why somebody wanted to do it.”