Break into her truck on her first night in town and she shrugs, saying she probably parked in the wrong place.

But steal a Marine Corps flag she displayed in front of her home to honor her son — well, that's going too far.

"Shouldn't there be at least some honor," asks Chandler, who moved to Modesto on Sept. 19. "Isn't this some new low? I want my flag back."

She is sure it happened Saturday, just after the mail came. The carrier had even remarked on how much she liked the flag, which was displayed on a stand in front of the home.

"I was in the house, and I heard an adult and a child have this conversation as they walked by. The child was saying 'No,' and the adult kept insisting 'Just go do it.'"

The next time she went out of the house that morning, the flag and its stand were gone. Both she and her fiancé canvassed the neighborhood around their home on Bowen Avenue to no avail. Now Chandler has put a box in front of her house, with a sign and plea to the culprits to return the flag.

Her son, Sgt. Jeff Chandler, is a Marine serving near Baghdad.

"It's like they're trashing my son," Chandler complained. "I've got a blue star hanging in my window. I don't want it to turn into gold (the symbol for a family that lost a loved one)."

She had bought the 11-foot-by-14-foot flag at a street fair in Lodi. "It's got pretty stitching, like it's three-dimensional. When I lived in Lodi, it flew there from May until the day I moved here in September."

When she first came to visit her fiancé in Modesto, her truck was broken into when she parked it near Needham Street and Virginia Avenue. That, she says, was her fault for not knowing the town.

But this one? "What kind of scum steal a parent's flag?" she asked. "I want it back."