HOUSTON, Texas (KTRK) – It’s a crime so bizarre that locals don’t know what to think, and everything is caught on camera.

Surveillance video from a home in north Houston, near North Main and Quitman, shows a man leisurely walking toward a front yard.

Then he grabs a small tree and starts pulling on it.

Almost exactly a minute later he makes his way to another tree.

From another angle, he is seen struggling with the roots. Ten minutes later, he is back, this time with a tool to help him.

A neighbor even caught him red-handed, shouting out the question we all ask.

“Why are you taking the tree?” she asked.

“I’m cleaning up,” he replied.

However, this man was not their landscaper, but just a guy in a fishing hat who wanted to play a prank.

ABC13 found several holes in the neighborhood where trees had been ripped out.

“After the ‘someone stole my stuff’ moment passed, I thought, ‘Who steals trees? What? You stole a tree?’ I don’t understand,” Kelly Kindred said.

Kindred saw it through her home camera on her front yard and texted her neighbor Olivia Topet.

Topet is a runner.

“I ran after him. I caught up with him a few blocks away. He had put the tree in a shopping cart and was hiding behind another tree that was still in the ground,” Topet explained. “I said, ‘You can’t steal our trees.’ He looked at me and said, ‘I’m sorry ma’am, I’ll put it back,’ and then he ran away.”

“Is it something I would recommend to other people? No. Am I grateful to have my tree back? Yes,” Kindred said. “My other neighbor got in her Jeep when she saw Olivia running and followed her to make sure she was safe. So it’s kind of like girl power in this neighborhood.”

Just as ABC13 was finishing the interview with Topet, she realized something.

Their bushes are gone too.

“Shrubs, trees, maybe nothing is safe, I don’t know,” she said. “I feel like I scared him, but I’m 100 percent sure he’s doing it somewhere else. Probably right now.”

The neighbors have not reported the incident to the police because they don’t necessarily want the man arrested or punished. They just want him to leave their property alone.

The district attorney’s office never thinks of charging anyone with tree theft, but it is a crime and it could happen.

As for the tree thief’s motive, everyone is at a loss.

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