What donors gave, thieves took away
Linda and Mario Ferrara, parents of a fallen soldier, had gathered $8,000 worth of clothes and blankets to send to injured troops. It all disappeared overnight when someone broke into their RV.
The Ferraras had filled their motor home chest-deep with boxes of zip-up hoodies, underwear and eagle-emblazoned blankets -- a rolling trove of gifts intended for U.S. troops abroad.
But when Linda Ferrara checked on the RV, parked outside the family's bakery in Compton this weekend, she found a lot of empty boxes. A heartfelt note thanking the troops for their service was ripped into confetti.
Ferrara, whose son Matthew Ferrara recently died in Afghanistan, burst into tears.
Her husband, Mario Ferrara, who arrived about an hour later, wondered what they would tell MaryAnn Phillips, the military support group contact who was expecting the boxes at the Army's Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany. And what would they tell the more than 60 people who had donated clothes, tailored blankets and knitted beanies?
"Soldiers over there risk their lives with little or no thanks," Linda Ferrara, 58, said Thursday as the family gathered replacement items at their Bay Cities Italian Bakery. "They're risking their lives for these lowlifes!"
As the sweet smell of bread wafted out of their low-slung bakery in an industrial part of Compton on Thursday, the Ferraras and their daughter, Simone Carmichael, busily answered a flood of e-mails offering help, spoke to camera crews and took orders for bread deliveries.
A neighbor dropped off two plastic bags filled with hundreds of T-shirts in the middle of the day. Phillips, a volunteer for the nonprofit group Soldiers' Angels at Landstuhl, had called from Munich.
She told Ferrara not to worry. Ferrara told her not to worry.
"I'm getting over the stress," she told Phillips. "We're going to get more stuff. We're going to make more blankets."
Ferrara, a slim, tireless woman who wears Matthew's dog tags or a beaded necklace with his picture every day, met Phillips in January. The Ferraras had stumbled upon Phillips' blog post describing a medical evacuation from a rugged mountainside in Afghanistan. It was the aftermath of an ambush that had killed Matthew instantly.
Matthew, a 24-year-old Army captain, never went to Landstuhl, where injured service members are taken from the battle zones, but Phillips told the Ferraras about men in Matthew's company who ended up there.
The Ferraras, who live in Torrance and have three other sons in the Army, try not to think about injuries that might send their sons to Landstuhl. But they wanted to do something.
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