Florida girl, 8, leaves note for burglar: "Just be nice"

When Wendy Chay Son came home to a burglarized house, she cried.

Later, she wrote a note to the burglar: “We are sad that you have been steeling in this house. You are not the only one that has feelings We all do,” Wendy wrote in the careful lettering of an 8-year-old.

Her father found the letter taped up in a front window of their home.

The letter, and the burglary that launched it, led to an Internet-based fund raiser to help the family replace some of what was stripped from them. Organizer Mark Anthony Parrilla-Focarile hopes Wendy will read the letter at a political forum he’s organizing Monday — and possibly get the burglar to change his ways.

That’s what Wendy is hoping for, too. In a margin of her letter, after she’d run out of paper at the bottom, she wrote, “I hope you will change and be good. God will forgive you.”

It wasn’t supposed to be this way. Wendy’s home is in a neighborhood with mostly modest single-family homes, children riding bikes and neighbors working in their yards. It was the first house Wendy’s parents bought in the United States, and they moved there after renting in Delray Beach.

They’d lived there just a week or two before the burglar struck, just in the 10 minutes it took Wendy’s pregnant mother to drop her off at school and return home, her parents said.

The burglar moved quickly, snatching up electronics, some jewelry, even some shoes. Wendy’s father, José Chay, said the worst thing lost was a tablet computer that Wendy uses for school work. She’d also been using a new laptop computer that was stolen, said mother Albertina Son.

Though the Feb. 13 burglary took stuff from from the family, it did help them get to know some of the neighbors. Parrilla-Focarile, whose mother lives nearby, quickly bonded.

“I told the father we have to officially be brothers so she can be my niece. She calls me Uncle Mark,” he said. “There’s something beautiful, something special in Lake Worth, where people reach out.”

He said he hopes Wendy can read her letter at 6 p.m. Monday at the candidate forum put on by by the Genesis Neighborhood Association at St. Andrew’s Lutheran Church, 928 South E St.

The fund raiser started Friday had raised $280 toward a $3,500 goal of replacing everything that was stolen. Maybe, says Parrilla-Focarile, the burglar might realize the effect he had on an 8-year-old girl.

Wendy doesn’t know the burglar will get the message, but she has hope.

“I wrote the letter for the robbers to stop stealing from our houses,” she said. But in the letter, she also offered a positive message.

“If you start being nice you will have friends that will be nice to you. If they are not nice just go with somebody that is nice,” she wrote. “I hope you will have a better life.”

Cox Media Group