He doesn't have the distorted nose of Owen Wilson, the infectious smarm of Vince Vaughn or the $209,255,921 domestic total gross of their 2005 mega-hit Wedding Crashers, but Stephen Kadlec did manage to slip in uninvited to a Garden Grove wedding reception in 2007 and, according to police, walk away with $1,800 in weekend box office.
Check that: it was $1,800 from the wedding gift box.
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If the fellow shown in the surveillance photo above is indeed the man who made off with the box, then there is no denying Garden Grove Police finally got their man, at least when you compare these to the mug shot that opened this post.
In
August 2007, a man walked into the Garden Room Chapel, 12777 Knott St., Garden Grove, and pretended to be a
wedding guest. The wedding crasher ambled over to the card table and, when no one was looking, swiped the gift box
containing at least $1,800 in cash and checks.
But someone was watching–actually, some thing: the wedding chapel's “excellent” video surveillance system, according to police.
Investigators received several tips after the
media released the images in 2007, but it was only recently that a tipster added a name to the footage: Stephen Kadlec.
That led Garden Grove's finest to Riverside County, where the 38-year-old Canyon Lake resident was arrested about 1 p.m. Wednesday.
Police are now seeing if they can link Kadlec to other crimes.
Anyone else missing a wedding gift box?
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.