After burglar strikes, officers rescue Christmas for mother and her 7 children

Everything had come together for this to be a special Christmas for Flavia Gallegos and her seven children.

Their modest house in north Wichita teemed with colorful decorations, their Christmas tree was looked like it could be on a postcard, and thanks to a generous social worker there were a couple of presents under the tree for each of her kids.

“Everything was so perfect,” Flavia said, “until...”

The family left for Mexico to visit her husband for the holidays. While they were gone, someone broke in through a bedroom window and ransacked the house. They stole all of the Christmas presents, still unopened beneath the tree.

“It was like a tornado come through my house,” Flavia’s said after getting her first look last Tuesday at what had happened. “It was very sad.”

The Christmas tree had been knocked over, the star on top broken. Shattered glass was on a table and the floor. Every room in the house had been rifled through, the floors littered with belongings tossed by the burglar.

“They were like, ‘What happened to my room?’ ‘Where’s the presents?’” Flavia said. “I try and tell my kids, ‘Don’t cry.’”

It didn’t always work.

“I was just mad because I didn’t want anyone to break into our house,” said Alexa, who’s 8. “Everything was broken.”

The house was such a dirty mess, Flavia said, she didn’t want to call the police.

“I was so embarrassed” by how bad it all looked, she said. But her oldest daughter, who is grown and lives two doors down, urged her to report the crime. Otherwise, she said, the burglar may strike again.

Officer Kasey Weidner went to the house to handle the report and was “very upset” when she heard what had happened to the family.

“It really tore me up a little bit inside,” Weidner said, tears welling in her eyes.

After leaving the house, she met with another officer and said, “We’ve got to do something. Something has to be done.”

She asked a community policing officer for guidance and then sent a group e-mail to Patrol North officers asking for donations. Whatever she could raise in 24 hours would go toward rescuing Christmas for the Gallegos family.

She was hoping for a few dollars here, a few dollars there. But the response stunned her: In less than 24 hours, more than 15 officers had donated a total of several hundred dollars. A local Walmart chipped in to take the sum over $1,000.

“It really snowballed,” Weidner said. “I got a great response from officers willing to help.

“I didn’t think it would go as big as it did.”

Weidner and the community policing officer returned to the Gallegos house and surprised the family. Each of the children received $100 gift certificates, with the rest going to Flavia for other expenses.

When she met with the family, Weidner said, “I actually couldn’t talk. I’m not going to lie. I teared up and I couldn’t talk.”

After Weidner had taken the initial report and left the house, Gallegos cautioned her children to tell no one about the burglary and what they had lost. No one would care, she said.

When the two officers showed up the following night, “I was kind of worried and kind of scared,” said Jorge, 17. “Did something happen?”

That made the arrival of the gifts even more powerful.

“I could see tears in everyone’s eyes,” Weidner said.

They were tears of joy – and disbelief.

“This is for us?” Joana Gallegos, 15, asked the officers.

“Yeah, this is for all of you,” Weidner told her.

“But these people don’t even know me and they’re buying us things?” Joana persisted.

The family is still shaken by the burglary.

“Now everyone is scared because of what happened,” Flavia said.

One of her sons doesn’t feel safe to sleep in the house since the burglary and spends the night elsewhere.

She’s lived in the house for 30 years and never had a break-in before, Flavia said. She hopes there will never be another one.

Her husband is completing the necessary steps to immigrate from Mexico and hopes to join the rest of the family this year.

Even as they reel from the blow of the crime, however, the family chooses to focus on the positive.

That police officers would raise so much money to help people they don’t even know was “shocking,” Joana said.

“We just expected them to take notes and then leave,” Joana said. “We didn’t expect them to do anything for us.”

They had heard stories of support for other people, but never envisioned it would happen for them.

“When something bad happens to you at the beginning of the year, you expect the rest of the year to go in that way,” Joana said. “When something like this happens, it just raises your hopes up that maybe something good will come out of everything bad that happens.”

This story was originally published January 6, 2018 at 1:19 PM with the headline "After burglar strikes, officers rescue Christmas for mother and her 7 children."