ARVADA, Colo. — When you leave your home, you expect to come back at the end of the day to find everything the way you left it. An Arvada family wants help finding out what happened on their front lawn while they were gone.
Joel Maxwell has lived along Oak Street for the last three years, and not much has changed in that time.
“The school got shut down, but that happened right when I moved in,” said Maxwell.
Back then, it was just him and his three kids. Now, he’s engaged, and his family has nearly doubled in size.
“Seven of us is a lot,” said Joel.
His fiancé, Mavianne Gideon, has two boys of her own.
“That’s a big change,” said Gideon. “There's already a lot of changes going on, and a very unexpected one. They took everything there, so there's just a hole now.”
A hole in their hearts, and their front yard.
“They took the entire trunk and everything,” said Gideon. “They removed the entire tree. It's just bizarre. I don't know what to make of it.”
Gideon said the tree was there when they left for work Tuesday morning but when they came home that night, she said it was gone.
“It’s kind of on us to do our own investigating at this point, so we’re just trying to figure it out,” said Gideon.
Joel’s seven-year-old daughter Zadie Maxwell has a theory on who took the tree and why. “Maybe a random person just came up and they needed a tree to build a boat or something,” said Zadie.
“We're just trying to figure out what happened to it, and why it was taken,” said Gideon.
The couple called the City of Arvada, and they didn't remove it. Their neighbors don't know what happened. So, they filed a police report.
“Did you want to see the video,” Gideon asked Joel. “They got the Ring footage.”
Their neighbor’s Ring doorbell camera is helping paint a better picture by capturing the tree and the crew that took it down.
“See this truck and that truck,” Gideon said to Joel as they watched the clips together for the first time. “Neither of them are marked.”
The video showed the tree standing tall in their front yard. Then a crew pulled up chopped it down and left with the bits and pieces.
“I'm hoping somebody, anybody can recognize the vehicles or people,” said Gideon. “It could've been just an easy address mix-up but that's a big mistake.”
Oak Street covers several blocks throughout Arvada, stopping and starting in different locations. There's also an Oak Court and an Oak Way. We spoke to a local tree expert who said he's seen this before – a tree removal company types the wrong street name in their GPS and that tiny error results in a big problem.
“It was a good tree,” said Gideon. “It was healthy. There was no reason for it to be cut down.”
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