Three days before Christmas, a Putnam County deputy sheriff responded to an unusual call — three-fourths of a Christmas tree had been stolen.
Deputy Robert Dekle went to the Goodwill store to talk to the manager who had phoned in the complaint. She said part of a 12½-foot artificial Christmas tree was outside the front of the store because it was too big to keep inside. The top of the tree was kept inside the store, but “they left the lower part of it outside of the store thinking no one would steal a partial tree that was missing its top,” Dekle wrote in his report. The tree was reportedly valued at $450.
The manager said the theft was captured on a security camera. Dekle watched the video and, according to his report, around 3:30 a.m. Sunday, Dec. 22, a Ford F-150 pickup backed up to the front of the Goodwill store. A woman got out, loaded the tree in several pieces into the back of the truck, and drove away.
The truck's tag was clearly visible in the video, so Dekle looked it up in the state’s records and learned it was registered to a man living on River Oak Drive in Putnam County.
“I drove to the address and observed the three-quarter assembled tree on the front deck of the residence with the light cord going into the residence,” Dekle described in his report.
A woman named Kristina Rodriguez answered the deputy’s knock on the door. When asked how she got the tree, Rodriguez reportedly said a friend had dropped it off there. Deputy Dekle told her about the security camera video and said the woman in the video “looked a lot like her.”
“I asked her if she was the person I saw; (and) Rodriguez then confessed that it was her that took the tree,” Dekle says in his report.
While the deputy was arresting Rodriguez, the owner of the F-150 drove up and introduced himself to Dekle. The man reportedly said Rodriguez lived in an RV behind his house, and he had “no knowledge of her taking the tree other than she just showed up with it.”
A check with the Georgia Crime Information Center revealed that the sheriff's office of Taylor County, Florida, wanted Rodriguez for probation violations. Records provided by the Putnam County Sheriff’s Office show that Rodriguez was on probation for a conviction of contraband and substance abuse-related charges, and she hadn’t reported to the probation officer or paid the court’s charges since 2022.
Kristina Dolores Rodriguez, 50, is in Putnam County Jail facing charges of misdemeanor theft by taking and fugitive from justice – Taylor County, Fla.