My daughter, aged 12, loves Halloween. It’s always been her favorite holiday. Since she was a toddler, we’ve decorated our front porch and front yard for Halloween. This year, we went all out: we bought a larger-than- life-sized plastic skeleton for $40 from Target and hung it from a tree in our front yard, half a block up the hill from Chester Creek Cafe. This morning, my daughter and her father prepared to set up the coup de grace for our very cool front yard Halloween display: strobe lights.But they discovered that the skeleton had been stolen overnight. Who would be so low as to steal from a child, and destroy her Halloween display? My daughter is devastated, that someone would actually enter her yard and steal the skeleton she put up to celebrate the holiday. It was also something that would take some work to do, as it was hung from a tree pretty high up from the ground. How can such a thief live with himself or herself, knowing that they stole the skeleton they now own and are probably displaying in their dorm room or off-campus housing? This is the kind of vicious stunt perpetuated on local families that gives — rightly or wrongly — the students living in the neighborhoods near UMD a bad rap.

UPDATE: I closed the comments to this thread — and accidentally deleted an OP comment in doing so, but it was made by a troll so I’m not too bent out of shape about my inadvertent act of censorship. While many who both supported me *and* disagreed with me had intelligent and thoughtful things to say, it was obvious that the thread was being hijacked.