Upon returning from a recent weekend trip, members of the Voskuil family, of St. Elmo, were surprised to find a large tree missing from their backyard. All that remained was the stump, on which “The Tree Bandits” was written in large letters with a Sharpie marker.
“There was not a leaf on the ground,” said Barron Voskuil. “It was like there was never a tree there.”
Confused, she reached out to people on the neighborhood email list to see if anyone knew what may have happened.
“I figured somebody has to know something, but no one had any idea,” she said. “No one saw or heard anything.”
One neighbor suggested an EPB contractor may have been the culprit, though the unprofessional Sharpie writing on the stump made this theory unlikely.
Voskuil said her first thought had been that someone took the tree for its wood, but then she found it neatly stacked by the back of the house.
A swing for Voskuil’s 14-month-old that hung from one of the tree’s branches had been placed carefully nearby, she added.
A few days after her email, Voskuil received a reply from the email address ChaTheTreeBandits@gmail.com stating that the Tree Bandits are “just a couple neighborhood peeps who like to help out.” The email said it took a while for the group to figure out which home belonged to the Voskuils – which suggests the group cut down multiple trees that day – and that they had tried knocking on the Voskuils’ door before removing the tree, but when they realized no one was home, they went ahead and just got it out of the way.
While the email resolved some of the mystery, Voskuil still wondered why the group would assume the family would want its healthy tree, which supplied the majority of the shade in the yard, removed from their property.
After talking to neighbors, she discovered that the Saturday the family was gone, there was a big storm which could have knocked down the tree, which is only visible from an alleyway.
“I guess they live in St. Elmo, and they did it purely to help us out,” Voskuil said of the Tree Bandits.
The Tree Bandits did not respond to an email requesting comment. The group has a website, http://chathetreebandits.wixsite.com/chathetreebandits, which features only a few photos of the group cutting trees and a Gandhi quote: “We must be the change we wish to see.”
Contact Emily Crisman at ecrisman@timesfreepress.com or 757-6508.