Thief Burglarizes Local Church

On Thursday afternoon, Dec. 22, officers from the responded to Saint Patrick's Church on the 700 block of DeKalb Street for a report of a theft.

At the church, officers interviewed the church operations manager who stated she had arrived at the church at 8 a.m. on Thursday to find the Chestnut Street-side door open. After searching the church and finding no one, she noticed the prayer collection boxes in front of the shrines on either side of the church had been pried open and approximately $10 in cash was missing from the boxes.

The operations manager also noticed that each of the six poor boxes had small holes where the locks had been punched out with a tool, but the thief or thieves could not access the cash inside those boxes.

A church worker who had been delivering Christmas decorations on Wednesday, Dec. 21, told police that while working in the front of the church, he heard the doors at the back open and close, but saw no one in the church. He later locked up and left the church. The worker believes the thief or thieves may have come in at that time and hidden in the bathroom until after he had left.

Police have no suspects in the crime.