Photo courtesy Jillian Laffrey.
There’s one every year. A real-life Grinch (or group of Grinches) has to go and put a damper on the holiday season by committing some sort of petty crime that will surely land them on the naughty list. On Sunday, the Thomas Circle Singers—a local choir group that’s been performing charity concerts in the District for nearly 40 years—gave their annual holiday concert at St. Paul’s Lutheran Church in Tenleytown. Afterwards, they discovered they’d been robbed.
“During this beautiful concert, of which a portion of the proceeds went to help Thrive DC, credit cards from six performers were stolen from the basement of the church,” Jillian Laffrey, a TCS singer and Secretary for the Board of Directors, told DCist via email. Before the concert, the TCS singers left their personal belongings in the church’s basement for what they thought was safekeeping. Sometime during the performance, they believe someone snuck down to the basement and swiped credit and debit cards from six of the performers. Overall, fifteen credit and debit cards were stolen.
The Thomas Circle Singers were formed in 1976, with a mission by its founders to use music to improve the neighborhood, says Clark Cheney, TCS board chair and a singer in the group. Each year, the choir puts on a holiday concert to benefit a different local charity. This year, the Thomas Circle Singers partnered with Thrive DC—a Columbia Heights-based organization that works to prevent and end homelessness in the District—for their annual show. Cheney tells DCist that theft was “incredibly disquieting and disheartening,” but what was a more frustrating experience, he says, was how the situation was handled when he went to report it to police.
“As the chairman of the board, I compiled a list of all the victims, what was stolen, the date and time of the incident, and a list of potential witnesses,” Cheney, who is also an attorney, says. He took all of the necessary information down to the Second District police station on Idaho Avenue NW to file a report when he was initially told that he couldn’t, because he wasn’t one of the people whose credit card was stolen. “The first question they asked was ‘Did you have a card stolen?'” he says. After he told them no, the officer working the desk told Cheney that they couldn’t take a report from him. “I was flabbergasted by that response,” Cheney says. “I was just amazed at the resistance for just simply trying to give information.”
Eventually, Cheney says he was able to get police to take a look at the theft, and a detective is on the case. Although a bunch of stolen credit cards isn’t such a high-priority crime—once you’ve realized you had a credit or debit card stolen you can easily cancel it and the fraudulent charges—Cheney says it’s the way the police have handled the situation that bothers him most. “What we’d like is pressure on the police to take this seriously. There should be sufficient evidence to solve this case. There are numerous security cameras at the church,” he says.
Metropolitan Police Department spokeswoman Gwen Crump tells DCist that they’re actively “investigating a theft at that location in which multiple people had property taken.” An MPD officer in the Second District confirms with DCist that it is, in fact, policy that one cannot file a police report on someone else’s behalf. However, online, you can do that.
“It’s a difficult time of year to freeze bank accounts and cancel credit cards,” Laffrey says. “All we want to be doing is buying gifts for our family, and enjoying some holiday cheer.”
