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Dan Kegley/Dave Cullop, left, and Kevin Testerman of the Chilhowie Police Department look for possible tell-tale fingerprints left on a window broken Thursday morning during a theft at Loaves and Fishes Food Pantry. 

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Thieves strike food pantry for second time

By DAN KEGLEY/Staff

It may be a sound heard often in the courtroom when he’s working his other job as an attorney, but on Thursday, the normally pleasant and pastoral voice of the Rev. John Graham had a distinct edge.
“If anybody was in need of food, all they had to do was ask. If they were looking for money, this was a foolish place to break into.”
Graham was speaking from the Loaves and Fishes Food Pantry in Chilhowie where he and his church, Mountain View United Methodist, are ardent supporters. As he talked, glass glittered on the floor shattered from a window sometime overnight.
Nearby, bags of snack chips lay on the concrete, knocked or tossed from their shelf.
A chest freezer stood with its lid up, the crust of ice on its walls slowly melting but the dinners stacked within still solid.
It was the second break-in at the food pantry in exactly three weeks.
Chilhowie policeman Kevin Testerman hunted fingerprints on shards of glass remaining in the window, broken from outside for access to its latch and then slid up. He removed the window section and laid it on a table where he worked to free several wedges of glass bearing fingerprints. These pieces were bound for a laboratory for further examination.
Linda Herrell, pantry director, watched the investigation proceed.
“They’re breaking in, making a mess, taking a little bit of food,” she said of the incidents she called “a little bit scary.”
The scenario was similar July 2 when a rock smashed through the glass of a door between the pantry office and the then-unlocked waiting room. That sheltered space was added a couple of years ago on to the former Chilhowie Rescue Squad headquarters on South Pine Avenue where the pantry has operated for years.
Chilhowie Police Chief Steve Price recommended locking the waiting room as well, a procedure followed, Herrell said.
This time, the window in the food storeroom was compromised.
In both break-in, thieves took small amounts of food but nothing else was disturbed that would indicate the culprit or culprits were in search of money, none of which is in the building, Herrell said.
But the July 2 incident left more of a mess, Herrell said.
The first time, energy drinks turned up missing, Herrel said. This time, the shelter had received a new shipment of food Wednesday, not yet inventoried at the time of the break-in. It’s unknown precisely what was taken, but no large quantity of any food item appeared absent.
In considering the two break-ins, Testerman developed a theory. “I think it’s somebody on foot because they’re not taking a lot of food, just what they can carry maybe in their pockets or in a backpack.”
Early on, Graham and Herrell knew the incident Thursday happened between 4 p.m. Wednesday and 10:30 Thursday morning, also the timeframe of the July 2 incident.
But when CPD officer Dave Cullop stopped by the pantry to help Testerman recover evidence for analysis Thursday, he narrowed the incident window to about five hours.
On patrol past the adjacent Valley Heath Care, he said, as dawn broke and “the birds had started singing,” he swung his light across the front of the food pantry. He knew that around 5:45 Thursday morning, the window remained intact, he said.
Cullop also recalled that around 6:15 that morning, he spotted some youth out in town and talked with them.
One of them had a back pack, he said.
Lying on the floor near the broken window, a zipper pull offered another clue that, with the fingerprints and Cullop’s sighting, gave Testerman confidence that the mystery of the food pantry pilferings will be solved.
“We think we know who is involved,” he said.