Stolen statue

What is missing from these photos? A statue of the Dr. Seuss character "the Lorax" stolen from the oceanside garden of the author's widow Audrey Geisel. When the 90-year-old looked out the back window of her La Jolla, California, home on Monday morning, it was gone and so was the tree-stump base reading "unless" on which it stood (video here). The Lorax statue at the family estate (5th image) was the only existing duplicate of the one created by Audrey Geisel’s daughter, sculptor Lark Grey Dimond-Cate, for the Dr. Seuss National Memorial Sculpture Garden dedicated in 2002 in her stepfather’s hometown of Springfield, Massachusetts (4th image). The mold was destroyed after the statue, valued at $10,000 (and worth much less if the bronze is melted for scrap), was cast. Altogether it stood 2' tall and weighed 300lbs, so it would have been no mean feat to drag it to an access road and hoist it over the fence.

Possibly the crime - and certainly the media coverage - would not have occurred if the book had not recently been made into a movie. The family just wants the statue returned and won't press charges if it is done so voluntarily. Dimond-Cate said, “I want very badly to get our little Lorax back home where he belongs. Wherever he is, he’s scared, lonely and hungry. He’s not just a hunk of metal to us. He was a family pet.”