Young Thieves Vandalize Alex's Lemonade Stand
Young burglars broke into the headquarters of Alex's Lemonade Stand Foundation in Ardmore and stole donations and wristbands - and bottles of lemonade - sometime last Friday night.
"You can't get more despicable than that," Haverford Township Detective George Christake said yesterday.
A lipstick-size security camera captured the grainy images of four juveniles as they climbed onto a truck parked at a loading dock behind the building, hopped onto the roof, tore off the window screens, and broke into the office of the organization.
The foundation was named for Alexandra Scott, the 8-year-old who died of neuroblastoma, a childhood cancer, on Aug. 1, 2004. When she was 4, she and her parents opened the first stand, which grew into a national fund-raising campaign for pediatric cancer research and treatment. Since 2000, the organization has collected about $7 million.
Organizers said cash is almost never kept at the office, which mainly stores T-shirts, lemonade-stand banners and packets.
During the weekend break-in, the burglars pried open locked file cabinets looking for money. What they found was a large jar of coins and an unknown amount of cash that children had dropped off late Friday afternoon from a lemonade-stand fund-raiser.
When the burglars left, they also took bottles of lemonade and rubber wristbands that read, "One cup at a time."
But they left behind fingerprints and footprints police are trying to match to those in a crime database. At least three of the juveniles were male and one was barefoot, police said.
The juveniles knew who they were targeting when they broke into the charity, authorities also said. The office is not well-marked and sits on the top floor of a former commercial laundry. Inside, the office walls are painted a bright lemon-yellow and covered with photos and posters of Alex.
"They had to know we were here, obviously," Liz Scott, Alex's mother, said yesterday.
She said the theft was discovered by an office worker who came in Sunday to answer telephones after a television documentary about Alex was to have aired.
"The fact that it is young people is more disturbing to me," Scott said. "We exist for kids, started by a child, and really, most of our lemonade stands involve children."
Haverford Township police have set up an anonymous tipline and ask that anyone with information about the burglary to call 610-853-1298, Ext. 847.
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