Family leaves message for thief who stole their prized pumpkin

AMERICAN FORK — Rude is the only way to describe what happened to a family in American Fork. Their prized pumpkin that came from their own garden is now missing.

Dusten Batty and her husband love planting and taking care of crops in their garden.

They have grown so much food lately that they have started putting a box outside their fence to give extra vegetables to their American Fork neighbors.

"I even zip-tied some bags to it so they can grab bags," said Batty with a smile.

What really got them excited this year, though, was their pumpkin harvest, especially one big pumpkin at nearly 60 pounds.

"It's the largest one we ever grew," said Batty. "Everybody sees it and everybody is going, 'I like your pumpkin. That is a huge pumpkin.' And it's like, yeah, we're getting excited, you know? But it disappeared!"

That's right, gone. That pumpkin was growing on the opposite side of their chain-link fence next to the sidewalk because the vine went through it.

Sometime in the middle of the night, someone snapped that vine and took off with it.

Batty had to tell her husband. "He's like, 'You got to be kidding me,'" she said.

That's how the big missing pumpkin mystery began, but it's not how it ended. Batty wanted to let the thief know that stealing a pumpkin isn't very nice. So, using plastic cups, she wrote a message in the very same fence.

"You are scum who stole our pumpkin," she said with a laugh while reading the message.

The sign her husband wrote wasn't so friendly. The sign says, "Your a lowlife who stole our pumpkin, burn in (expletive) ... "

"This is funny to me because I know they're going to get the message," she said.

That message just might be getting more attention than the big pumpkin itself. However, it's a message that Batty hopes really grows.

"I hope they feel they did wrong and hopefully they don't do it again," she said. "Respect other people's property."

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