The thief or thieves parked on the street at such an angle that they were hidden from neighbors’ doorbell surveillance cameras. Then they went to work.

It was only in the morning’s light that victims realized what was stolen.

For the second time over a three-year period, someone had chopped off and carted away the waxy, 2- to 4-foot-long serrated leaves from picturesque agave plants lining homes in east Torrance.

Homeowners and residents are baffled by the attacks upon their beautiful — but otherwise seemingly useless — plants.

“Why on Earth would anybody steal these leaves?” Torrance homeowner Steven Maier, 72, asked. “A couple of years ago, another neighbor warned me about this agave, and I joked that I wasn’t ‘going to be protecting this with a gun or anything.’ And then one day, ‘poof,’ it’s gone.”

Maier, a retired doctor, said he arose that Sunday, Nov. 9, to grab his newspaper, only to find he’d been hacked.

His roughly 8-foot-tall, 7-foot-wide, 150-pound century plant had all but a few of its 35 spear-like leaves sliced off. The robust green plant was the centerpiece of a garden that includes smaller, greener Elephant’s Trunk agaves, spiny South African bitter aloe, and the Madagascan Aloe imalotensis.

Maier said the agave held sentimental value. He purchased it as a 15-gallon potted plant from a now-shuttered Ojai nursery in 2008. This is the second time his beloved arid succulent has been butchered, with the first incident taking place in 2022.

“It was a special plant to me,” Maier said, “and for someone who has been gardening for close to 40 years, it’s very sad for this thing to happen.”

He noted, however, that the plant only cost him “a few bucks” at the time — and he couldn’t fathom what the “value of leaves” could be.

Agave theft happens with some frequency.

Full plants were nabbed outside homes throughout Crestview, an upscale Beverly Hills-adjacent community, in 2022. Yards from San Diego to Arizona and even the famed Huntington botanical gardens in San Marino have all been victimized by theft.

In the case of Crestview, the thefts were believed to be motivated by the harvesting of the piña — the plant’s hearty, pineapple-like center that can weigh 100 or more pounds and is used for tequila and mezcal. The other agave and succulent thefts were linked to suspected resale efforts.

What makes Torrance unique is that none of the plants was outright stolen, though they were left “nearly unrecognizable,” according to resident Gayle Moore.

The 75-year-old owns a 113-year-old corner Craftsman home once filmed for a TV episode of the teen supernatural cult classic “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.”

As happened with Maier, Moore’s 7-foot-tall blue agave was slashed in 2022 and then again around 4 a.m. on Nov. 9.

“Last time, they cut closer to the trunk, and I wasn’t sure if the leaves would grow back,” Moore said. “This time, the guy left 4 to 5 inches from the trunk.”

Her plant, which previously resembled a mighty Greek phalanx in formation, was disfigured into a pincushion with a few jutting needles.

Moore said her agave is about 10 years old, and its roughly 25 leaves were hacked to three in 2022 and now six in November.

Moore said the early-morning hacker “has a pattern” in which he finds mature plants, cuts them, and then allows them to grow back again — prime for pruning.

“The plant was beautifully spread out,” Moore said. “It was gorgeous.”

Torrance seems a perfect mark for an ambitious agave pruner.

A dozen foxtail agaves line the businesses adjacent to Torrance High School, while another dozen Elephant’s Trunk agaves are across the way at the First United Methodist Church.

The surrounding streets could be mistaken for a botanical garden with yucca plants, cabbage trees and flat-flowered aloe all around.

Yet, those plants aren’t as coveted as the agaves, particularly the blue agave, the lone species used in tequila production.

Beyond the piña, however, opinions among botanical experts differ on the value of the leaves and their usage.

Staff members at the California Botanic Garden in Claremont don’t believe the leaves are of any use in alcohol production. They believe the cutting may be the work of a conscientious gardener, trimming away leaves that are blocking sidewalk access.

“It is not too unusual to prune such a plant in this way — partly for safety (though you can also just cut the tips of the leaves off),” said Lucinda McDade, the garden’s executive director, in an email. “It is sometimes referred to as ‘pineappling’ for obvious reasons.”

Terry Huang, the director of living collections at the South Coast Botanic Garden on the Palos Verdes Peninsula, said she had heard of a similar hacking but had “no idea” of the value of the leaves.

She said she wouldn’t classify the cutting as “necessarily good nor destructive” for the plant.

“Though unfortunate and not the most pleasant to look at, this likely won’t hurt the plants since they look quite healthy,” she said in an email. “There are enough leaves left for the plant to continue to grow.”

The large, broad leaves — or pencas — of blue agaves, century plants and similar species have value, according to UC Davis professor Samuel Sandoval Solis, a water resource specialist.

“There’s this Western vision of agave fields where they’re only used for tequila,” Solis said. “Traditionally, the plants and their leaves have been used for many centuries for other purposes.”

Solis said the leaves are generally utilized in cooking, clothing and animal feed, the latter particularly for goats.

Solis said fibers are scrapped from large, mature leaves and then dried, cleaned and eventually converted into products such as ropes and belts.

He suspects, however, that the leaves from the plants in the moderately wealthy suburb are being harvested for use in cooking barbacoa, a traditional Mexican dish of slow-cooked, chile-infused goat, beef or lamb, generally.

The barbacoa meat can be enjoyed in a variety of ways, though most commonly in tacos.

Often the meats are wrapped in agave leaves and cooked in underground ovens, though some pitmasters substitute banana leaves.

“What I’m thinking is that you have people here who love barbacoa or at least want to sell [the leaves] to those making it,” Solis said.

Solis said the good news for the plant owners is that leaves generally grow back and that the cutting performed by the unknown individuals isn’t too far off what actual pruning looks like.

“For people unfamiliar with these plants, it might look like mischief,” he said. “But I don’t think it’s a bad thing, and it actually shows the many things agave can be used for.”

So far, the Torrance residents haven’t formulated how they’ll proceed.

Moore said another resident chased a man driving a white van from the area in the overnight hours.

A couple of residents have shared surveillance video that shows a van pulling up near homes with agave, but there isn’t footage of the cutting.

Moore said she initially was going to file a police report but decided against it, saying she didn’t want to make her home “a further target.”

Randy Klinenberg, 67, had an unsettling experience just as he joined the neighborhood three years ago, moving into a Spanish-style colonial that is designated a city historical landmark and is home to four giant blue agaves.

In 2023, the week before Thanksgiving, the semiretired film producer and consultant returned from a wedding in Temecula to find that three of the plants had been clipped on consecutive mornings between 1 and 2 a.m.

“They hacked 1½ the first night and then left,” Klinenberg said. “Then they came back and hacked another 1½. I was freaked out because it was really unexpected.”

Klinenberg said the police told him then that there was nothing they could do without a license plate or further evidence.

Multiple inquiries sent to the Torrance Police Department regarding hacked agaves did not receive a response.

“I was originally going to have those first three plants removed because they looked so disturbing, but my gardener assured me that they would grow back,” Klinenberg said. “It took a couple of years, but they did grow back.”

Klinenberg also said he was hit again in the predawn hours on Nov. 8, this time with only one mature agave being hacked.

He said a resident posted a photo of a license plate on the social media app Nextdoor, but it’s unclear if any further action was taken.

Since then, he’s kept the lights on around his home and has been surveilling nearby activity on his Ring doorbell camera.

“It’s a shame you can’t have anything nice,” he said.

Maier, however, has had enough.

He asked a neighbor to help him uproot the “jewel” of his garden onto the curb.

The piña continues to sit on the sidewalk, unclaimed.

The post SoCal agave owners have been hacked. What are thieves doing with those filched leaves? appeared first on The Hemet & San Jacinto Chronicle.

Before little Ryu was born, he developed outside his mom’s womb, hidden by a basketball-sized ovarian cyst — a dangerous situation so rare that his doctors plan to write about the case for a medical journal.

Just 1 in 30,000 pregnancies occur in the abdomen instead of the uterus, and those that make it to full term “are essentially unheard of – far, far less than 1 in a million,” said Dr. John Ozimek, medical director of labor and delivery at Cedars-Sinai in Los Angeles where Ryu was born. “I mean, this is really insane.”

Lopez, a 41-year-old nurse who lives in Bakersfield, California, didn’t know she was pregnant with her second child until days before giving birth.

When her belly began to grow earlier this year, she thought it was her ovarian cyst getting bigger. Doctors had been monitoring the mass since her 20s, leaving it in place after removing her right ovary and another cyst.

Lopez experienced none of the usual pregnancy symptoms, such as morning sickness, and never felt kicks. Though she didn’t have a period, her cycle is irregular and she sometimes goes years without one.

For months, she and her husband Andrew Lopez went about their lives and traveled abroad.

But gradually, the pain and pressure in her abdomen got worse, and Lopez figured it was finally time to get the 22-pound cyst removed. She needed a CT scan, which required a pregnancy test first because of the radiation exposure. To her great surprise, the test came back positive.

Lopez shared the news with her husband at a Dodgers baseball game in August, handing him a package with a note and a onesie.

“I just saw her face,” he recalled, “and she just looked like she wanted to weep and smile and cry at the same time.”

Shortly after the game, Lopez began feeling unwell and sought help at Cedars-Sinai. It turned out she had dangerously high blood pressure, which the medical team stabilized. They also did blood work and gave her an ultrasound and an MRI. The scans found that her uterus was empty, but a nearly full-term fetus in an amniotic sac was hiding in a small space in her abdomen, near her liver.

“It did not look like it was directly invading any organs,” Ozimek said. “It looked like it was mostly implanted on the sidewall of the pelvis, which is also very dangerous but more manageable than being implanted in the liver.”

Dr. Cara Heuser, a maternal-fetal specialist in Utah not involved with the case, said almost all pregnancies that implant outside the uterus — called ectopic pregnancies — go on to rupture and hemorrhage if not removed. Most commonly, they occur in the fallopian tubes.

A 2023 medical journal article by doctors in Ethiopia described another abdominal pregnancy in which mother and baby survived, pointing out that fetal mortality can be as high as 90% in such cases and birth defects are seen in about 1 in 5 surviving babies.

But Lopez and her son beat all the odds.

On August 18, a medical team delivered the 8-pound (3.6-kilogram) baby while she was under full anesthesia, removing the cyst during the same surgery. She lost nearly all of her blood, Ozimek said, but the team got the bleeding under control and gave her transfusions.

Doctors continually updated her husband about what was happening.

“The whole time, I might have seemed calm on the outside, but I was doing nothing but praying on the inside,” Andrew Lopez said. “It was just something that scared me half to death, knowing that at any point I could lose my wife or my child.”

Instead, they both recovered well.

“It was really, really remarkable,” Ozimek said.

Since then, Ryu — named after a baseball player and a character in the Street Fighter video game series — has been healthy and thriving. His parents love watching him interact with his 18-year-old sister, Kaila, and say he completes their family.

With Ryu’s first Christmas approaching, Lopez describes feeling blessed beyond measure.

“I do believe in miracles,” she said, looking down at her baby. “God gave us this gift — the best gift ever.”

The post ‘The best gift ever’: Baby is born after the rarest of pregnancies, defying all odds appeared first on The Hemet & San Jacinto Chronicle.