Thieves will stop at little to get mitts on lychee

Stan Hong has a theory: “Lychee seems to bring out the worst in people.”

This is the beginning of the end of lychee season. Most of the trees are past their peak production and are slowing down.

Every year, there are stories of thieves climbing fences, breaking branches, stripping entire trees of the prized fruit. Has lychee theft gotten worse? Debatable. It has certainly not gotten better.

When Hong’s family first moved into their Wahiawa home in the 1990s, he saw a woman reverse her car into the neighbor’s yard, roll down the car window and start yanking handfuls of lychee from the neighbor’s tree. What shocked Hong was that the woman didn’t look like the sort of person who would steal fruit. “She looked like a second-grade teacher,” Hong said.

Over the years the stories have accumulated. Thieves have jumped over his fence in the dead of night, and they’ve reached over in the light of day.

“Last week I was mowing the lawn, doing yardwork,” Hong said. “I looked up, and there was a woman walking on the moss rock wall 15 feet away from me carrying one of those extendable fruit pickers. … I was incredulous.”

Hong asked the woman what she was doing. She answered, “Picking lychee,” like it was no big deal.

“I went through my spiel: ‘If you want pick, just ask and you can have. Why go straight to the steal? Why not ask?’” Hong gave her a chance. She didn’t ask.

In some neighborhoods the worst thieves these days are exotic birds, who swoop in to eat the soft flesh of the lychee, leaving behind empty shells.

The fruit is delicious, a delicacy made more precious because lychee season is so short and lychee trees can be unpredictable. Profit is certainly a motive in some theft cases. Lychee can sell for up to $10 a pound, so a successful raid could net several hundred dollars.

“My mom went out, and as she came home the kids across the street were selling buckets of them,” Joni Kamiya said. “She went back to check the trees, and sure enough, the low-hanging fruit were gone.”

That was on the Windward side. Fruit theft is a problem everywhere, and has been for years. “My grandparents had a huge tree that hung over the road in Pauoa, very susceptible to poachers,” Stu Hirayama said. “My grandpa would get mad, so he would try to pick. Grandma would call us to pick, because otherwise 90-year-old Grandpa would be climbing onto the ladder with the picker.”

Hong says he hasn’t called the police because they’d have to catch the thieves in the act. He has two large watchdogs to patrol his yard, and the Neighborhood Watch program is on alert because that part of town has so many lychee trees.

For some the trees aren’t worth the trouble. One of Hong’s neighbors finally got sick of the burden of owning a lychee tree and cut it down.

Reach Lee Cataluna at 529-4315 or lcataluna@staradvertiser.com.