About 24 flags stolen from a 9/11 healing field in Utah

LAKE POINT, Utah (NBC, KYMA) - A Tooele County, Utah community is angry about American flags going missing from a 9/11 healing field.

The group that organizes the display says someone stole around 24 flags last week.

A few yards off a noisy highway, nestled between a neighborhood and rest stops, is a pocket of peace in Tooele County.

"We felt like having a place where people could be reminded of that and the country that we were on September 12th," said Chaelea Allred, President of Lake Point Arts, a nonprofit.

Allred and community members helped pay for flags and materials in the healing field, with Allred saying they ended up with "about 100 flags."

However, when she noticed about five of them were taken out of the fence line, Allred had mixed emotions.

"We tried to believe that, you know, it was that they genuinely needed it more than we did," Allred said.

A few days later, Allred 19 more were gone.

"[It] made me sick to my stomach that someone would take a flag," Allred expressed.

Allred said they made sure none blew away or burned adding, "Some flags had been cut from their poles, and the poles had been left."

Her first instinct was to take them all down, but she called a friend of hers, Allred said, "He told me, 'If we take the flags down, then they win."

She posted to social media, asking people to help with the nearly $400,000 worth of stolen materials.

"Within an hour, we probably received almost $1,000 worth of donations," Allred shared.

Allred hopes this is teaching moment saying, "I want it to be something that they realize that you don't vandalize people's property if you're angry at our country, at what's going on at local officials, you have a voice and to use it."