Tale of stolen toys ends happily
Two charged with taking trailer full of treats for ill children
The theft was particularly cruel — a trailer filled with toys for children battling cancer.
But an all-out effort by the woman who runs the foundation that owns the trailer led to the toys being recovered and two men in custody, accused of the theft.
“I am ecstatically happy and I am so thankful to friends who actually saw the trailerandcalled theSunrisePolice Department,” said Silvia Vanni, co-founder and executive director of the Mystic Force Foundation.
Monday morning, a friend told Vanni that the trailer was not parked in its usual place near herNorth Miami home.
“Our trailer was stolen from the front of our house in our guard-gated community,” she said.
Vanni spent most of the day filing a police report, printing up posters, calling news outlets and saturating social media
with images of the missing trailer.
The effort paid off Monday night, she said, with a call from Sunrise police that her foundation’s trailer had been found in that city.
“I am so thankful to friends who actually saw the trailer and called the Sunrise Police Department,” Vanni said.
The tip sent plainclothes detectives to a storage shed behind a house in the 9100 block of Northwest 25th Court, where they watched two men unloading boxes, bags and bins from the trailer, according to arrest reports.
The owners of the home in front of the shed had nothing to do with the incident, Sunrise Police Officer Chris Piper said Tuesday.
Dudley Merus, 30, of Miami, and Endy Merus, 25, of North Miami, were taken into custody at the scene, Piper said. The men are related, but it’s not clear how, the officer said.
The two were booked into a Broward County jail. Both face a charge of grand theft greater than $20,000 and less than $100,000. Tuesday afternoon, they were each in the process of securing a $5,000 bond, according to the jail website.
Vanni is the co-founder and executive director of the Mystic Force Foundation, which raises money for cancer research and regularly sponsors fun nights at hospitals where donated toys are provided for children with cancer.
“All of these toys help these kids who spend weeks and months at a time inpatient,” Vanni said. “They get to have fun and be kids for one night and forget everything they’re going through.”
For Vanni, the effort is personal. She and her husband launched the foundation after her son Salvatore died of neuroblastoma in 2011, one month shy of his eighth birthday. He had been diagnosed at age 4.