San Jose residents say a thief is targeting Disney Christmas decorations

By Amanda Hari

People in part of San Jose say a thief is stealing their Disney-themed Christmas decorations.

The Steele family claims more than a thousand dollars worth of lawn figurines were taken in the middle of the night, and the person was caught on their surveillance video.

“It’s very frustrating,” said Amanda Steele. “I feel violated.”

It’s like a scene out of “How the Grinch Stole Christmas”, a man comes up and grabs a bunch of the large decorative figurines off the Steele family’s lawn in the middle of the night. Amanda Steele thinks he was looking for specific ones.

“They only took our Disney stuff,” Amanda explained. “We had six Disney items.”

Their doorbell camera caught a video of the person, despite their efforts to obscure the neighbor’s camera.

Amanda’s husband, Nathan, thinks the thief knew which items were worth the most money.

“The Disney ones, they do add up a lot,” Nathan said. “They’re ones are anywhere from 100 to 300$.”

A photo from a few weeks ago shows the lawn filled with light-up holiday decorations. Now, it’s much more sparse.

“We had most of our Disney decorations on the lawn here,” Nathan said. “We had Eeyore, then we had my favorite, which was the hot rod with Minnie and Mickey. We just got Dumbo that night. That was our new one of the year, and it got stolen that night.”

Nathan puts a lot of effort into this display, hours to put it up, and years collecting it all. He said his neighbors do the same, and they do it for the kids. He said it’s something they couldn’t afford growing up.

“We grew up, both me and my neighbor, poor, and we just decided we can do it now, and the kids love it, so that’s what it’s all about,” Nathan explained.

The Steele family doesn’t expect to get the decorations back, but they wanted to warn others. That’s when they noticed a trend.

“I initially posted it on Ring, and within the day, I had gotten another post by someone clearly in the same neighborhood that had said the same thing happen, and I noticed a Disney item as well,” said Amanda. “And then from there I had just been checking on Nextdoor, and everything to,o and that’s when I noticed there was a theme of this individual coming in and stealing their Disney themed stuff.”

Amanda filed a police report, and she’s encouraging the other victims to do the same. San Jose police say they did receive the report. The thief is currently unidentified and outstanding.

She said it’s sad to see how it’s affecting her kids.

“It’s Christmas, we do this for the kids,” Amanda said. “I have two kids, and we’re huge Disney fans, and for them to take only our Disney stuff, it’s a huge a blow.”