The owner of a Lakewood restaurant said today he was saddened to learn the “gruesome” fate of one of two life-size bronze sheep statues stolen from his property this month.
Lakewood police arrested Moises Rodriguez Fernandez, 28, Tuesday on felony charges of theft and theft by receiving after an employee of a northern Denver metal recycling service told officers people had tried to sell him a decapitated bronze animal.
At first, the metal recycler thought men were trying to sell him a bronze cow. Thinking that was suspicious, he took down the description of one of the men and his license plate number, said Steve Davis, a spokesman for the Lakewood police department.
Officers tracked the license plate and arrested Rodriguez Fernandez. He was taken to the Jefferson County Detention Center, where he remained this afternoon on $600 bond.
“The good news is we’ve made an arrest. The bad news is the art is missing,” Davis said.
Officers don’t know where the second bronze sheep might be, but a detective is actively working the case, Davis said.
For Charlie Wilson, owner of the White Fence Farm in Lakewood, the news of Rodriguez Fernandez’s arrest was bittersweet.
Wilson said he was glad officers had arrested someone in the case, but that the details of the first mutilated sheep statue, worth an estimated $10,000 to $15,000, disturbed him.
“You picture it in your mind and it’s disconcerting because you tend to think of them as real things,” Wilson said of the statues. “I guess because they were special to us, even as a sculpture it still seems gruesome to think that one of them had been dismembered.”
Wilson said the sheep were the oldest of more than a dozen statues sitting on the 12-acre White Fence Farm property. Looking at the statues “kind of gave you this bucolic feeling,” he said.
The restaurant owner said he hopes the artist who made the statues in 1989 will make new ones for them.
Wilson is also meeting with companies to discuss installing night vision cameras around the restaurant in hopes that no more of his beloved statues will go missing.
Liz Navratil: 303-954-1054 or lnavratil@denverpost.com
