| "Honey! Have you seen my poison dart tips?" |
| Now I know why Osama had that pained look on his face in the last picture ... |
Poison dart tips, a Brazilian woman's keepsakes laced with deadly frog secretions, were stolen from an office at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Authorities said the bizarre theft of tips, a bow, an arrow and a tribal necklace, poses an extreme danger to public safety. The poison dart tips, some 20 years old, were used by tribesmen to hunt tree monkeys and other South American prey. The items were taken late Wednesday or early Thursday from the office of Coal Oil Point Reserve executive director Christina Sandoval. "It's one of these strange things," university police Sgt. Mark Signa said.
| "We don't get a lot of poison dart tip thefts around here. It's not like in San Francisco, or someplace like that..." |
"We need to find them to keep anybody from getting hurt." Sandoval said the purloined items were keepsakes from her time as a master's degree student in her homeland of Brazil. They were gifts from natives she met while she was a student at Universidad de Campinas.
| "Poison dart tips? For me? Oh, you shouldn't have!" |
"The were just meant as a decoration piece, a memory," she said. "I hope it's not just a kid that is playing with it. It just would be horrible. Those are not toys."
| "That is not a toy! Put it down and go play outside!" |
The 10 to 20 dart tips were kept in a brown pouch. Native South Americans apply secretions from several species of frogs to poison arrow tips, which then are used to hunt howler monkeys, spider monkeys, capybaras or other medium-sized to large mammals, she said.
Mucky, where were YOU on the night in question? |
