SAN ANTONIO — You can hear the surveillance system mounted on the front of the house chirp a warning when a woman wearing a muumuu steps out of her car and approaches the front yard of the northeast side home near Paschall Elementary School.
But the fact that she was being watched was apparently lost on the woman, who appeared to be on a mission.
The vigilant camera captured the woman meander up to an area of freshly installed landscaping plants and one-by-one rip them from the ground.
With as much as she could carry, the video shows the woman make a leisurely return to her car and leave the area.
The homeowner, Ms. Jones said, "I came outside, getting ready for work, and going to put my trash out and I noticed my yard looked different and I said 'What's wrong with my yard?' And I looked down and there was just hole, hole, hole, hole, hole."
Jones said she was shocked to discover the Sweet Potato Vine plants she had transplanted just last week were almost all missing.
The hardy, fast growing ground cover bears no fruit and is just ornamental. "It's not even food. You can't even eat that. There's no potato under there!" Jones exclaimed.
"My thing is, if it had strawberries or fruit on it and you are hungry? That's one thing. But you can't do nothing with that!" Jones said, adding "If she had knocked and asked if she could have them? I have more!"
Jones said the video of the woman in the flowing dress aggressively take her plants was upsetting. "It made me late for work because I couldn't believe it. I was like, what? I couldn't believe it. It doesn't make sense that somebody would literally pull plants out of the ground!" Jones said.
"She did it like she lives here, bent over in her muumuu, just pulling plants like she's pulling weeds. Like she was at Home Depot or something," Jones said, adding that even at nurseries the plants are fairly inexpensive.
"So I looked at my camera and there was Nana in her muumuu, bent over, talking on the phone. I could hear her clearly saying 'People do it all the time!' and I'm like 'Do what all the time?' Steal plants out the ground. Who does that?'" she said.
Jones, who laughed heartily while recounting the story said, "You have to make jokes about stuff otherwise you'd be mad all the time."
Mounting a campaign to find the person she thought must be a neighbor close by, Jones posted the following on the NextDoor app.
"Somebody needs to come get their Nana!" she said. "She drove up and took plants out of my yard, I literally just planted last week....You are a thief. PERIOD. Shame on you. You could have asked. I have extra in the backyard. All in your muumuu and on the phone too. You live in the neighborhood... My own neighborhood people stealing my stuff."
Almost immediately, the comments section caught fire, with people of all sorts expressing their emotional reactions.
At first, Jones said she was overcome by anger. "I wanted to shake Nana. What's wrong with you Nana? Get it together!"
But as she read through the comments that had Nana on blast, Jones said she too couldn't stop laughing.
"Wow how rude of her."
"Oh wow. Shame on her!"
"Plants can be expensive!"
Jones said, "One that killed me was "Bold as brass!" and there's another one I hadn't heard in a while posted by a man "What in tarnation?"
The situation got even more unbelievable Tuesday morning when Jones said she received a call from her neighbor warning her that the harvester had returned.
Jones said she happened to be home and when she confirmed the woman was indeed parked out front again, she went out and confronted her.
"First she said the neighbor said it was okay and then she offered me $20," Jones said, adding that she refused the money and told the woman to leave and not return.
Jones said her take away from the experience is that you have to laugh about incidents like this because life is too short to be mad all the time.
Still, she said, everyone should be nicer to their neighbors.
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