Stolen golden treasure found ‘buried’ at a Richland junkyard house

When a 400-pound golden dragon disappeared from his lot in Richland, Collin Hooper didn’t have much hope of ever finding it.

Then his wife posted a photo on a popular Richland group’s Facebook page.

“It’s quite the story,” Hooper told the Tri-City Herald.

Hooper, a fan of the game Dungeons & Dragons, first spotted the colorful, winged creature at a Spokane store that specialized in metal and concrete sculptures.

He’d been eyeing it for months with dreams of putting it on some property in Richland when he learned the store was closing.

The price dropped, and he bought the solid aluminum statue for $1,500.

He hauled the roughly 6-foot statue back to Richland and used a forklift to place it on his undeveloped lot at the corner of Goethals Drive and Gillespie Street. It became something drivers and passersby admired and commented on.

The Hoopers believed the sheer size and weight of the monster and a chain tying it to a fence would keep it safe.

But last May, thieves sawed through the chain and somehow moved it off the pallet it was sitting on. No neighbors had cameras, and there was no other evidence to identify who might have taken it.

Hooper told the Herald he never thought it would turn up again. Any thief had to realize that it needed to be hidden because it would be too easily identifiable.

“We thought the dragon was going to be gone forever,” he said. “I didn’t think there was a point of putting up missing posters.”

Finding the dragon

But a month ago, Hooper’s wife Jenessa decided to post their missing statue on the Richland Residents Facebook page. She had recently joined the group and asked if anyone had any idea where it might have gone.

Comments started pouring in about how much people loved it and offering any tips they had.

Then came a message from the estranged wife of a man with a debris-choked yard on Hains Avenue in Richland, saying she might know where to find the dragon.

Lee A. Green III had taken over the home after his father’s death in 2014. Green III, before being jailed recently, had filled the yard with piles and piles of junk in the past year – everything from old tires and TVs to collections of rotting stuffed animals, furniture and a jacuzzi.

But the woman recalled that one of the items that he’d first brought to the yard was a dragon.

“She suspected it was stolen,” Collin Hooper told the Herald. “He had been filling up his yard with this huge hoard.”

So Hooper went to the house to check it out, walking down a narrow, foot-wide path through the crowded yard.

There, about 100 feet from the street next to a back fence, was a huge bright green dragon.

Clearly it had been painted over. Still, some of the gold color was still visible in spots, and the texture on the rock was the same.

“Once I saw the paint texture matched, I was just absolutely ecstatic,” he said.

Dragon statue rescue

Now they faced a new problem — how to get the hefty statue out of the yard through the maze of debris.

They couldn’t get a truck or forklift back to it, and there wasn’t enough space to move it through the yard.

They also didn’t have time to wait. The home was in the process of being foreclosed on, and they needed to retrieve it before new owners bought the property.

“I couldn’t figure out how we were going to get that dragon, but I know I had enough friends in the community that we were going to make it happen,” said Hooper.

With a deadline of three weeks, he and his wife went back to Facebook to recruit some help. They posted a dragon rescue event.

“I told them that their names would be written in legend,” Hooper said. “We got enough friends to help.”

So on sunny Sunday, March 22, a group of seven went to the Hains Avenue yard and started clearing a path.

They shifted items to make a 5-foot-wide route through the backyard.

One of Hooper’s friends devised a plan to lay down skids of metal so they could slowly slide the heavy statue to the street.

“We managed to get it out of the hoard in less than two hours. I couldn’t believe it,” he said. “With the help of six other people me, my wife and my son were able to get it off of the property onto the truck and back onto my property.”

Now, the dragon is back in its old spot and people who have been posting on social media that they are glad to see it back. He thanked Desmond, Jason, Natasha, Charm, Jess, Sam, Mackenzie and Emily for their help.

“We recovered it all thanks to my lovely wife, Jenessa,” he told the Herald. “She was the reason why we recovered it.”

This story was originally published April 6, 2026 at 5:00 AM.