Dos Pueblos High School’s mascot, Charlie the Charger, has been absent at sports games and school pep rallies throughout the entire 2024-2025 school year. As the school year comes to a close, there are many senior activities happening at DPHS without the usual involvement of Charlie.
“I think I’m probably taking it more personally than most because I know it’s missing,” said DPHS Activities Director Scott Guttentag. “A lot of other people are not aware that it’s missing … Every time at a big game [or] event [when] I’m bringing the [Amy Helmet] Car and I’m not bringing Charlie, it’s a reminder that Charlie should be here. I don’t have a lot of people asking me about it, but I have a lot of personal guilt about it.”
Every summer, Guttentag cleans out the Leadership classroom in P-02 in preparation for the new school year. Last summer, items of higher value, like the mascot suit, were temporarily placed in the office building for safekeeping and returned to P-02 at the end of the summer.
“This is where it gets a little bit confusing, because we’re not exactly sure when it all of a sudden wasn’t there,” Guttentag said. “We examined all the different places that it could have possibly gone … hoping that it was going to just kind of reappear, because somebody kind of just moved it.”
When a high school mascot goes missing, people may assume that it must have been stolen as a prank. Outside of P-02, there are security cameras that could have had footage of a thief, but, according to Guttentag, someone could have easily exited the school without being seen by them.
“At the beginning, we thought someone’s gonna wear it to school on Halloween, like as a joke,” said DPHS Vice Principal Ian Perry. “Or someone at San Marcos [High School] or Santa Barbara [High School] found it and saw it [when] they were here for something, and we were gonna see it at the football game.”
This would not be the first instance that DPHS property has been stolen, as the Amy Car was found on SMHS’s property in 2015. At this point in time, the mascot suit has not reappeared, and the possibility of needing to replace it has turned into a reality.
The Charlie the Charger suit was a gift from the senior class of 2022 and cost about $5 thousand when including the design process. The missing costume had only been in use for two years before it disappeared. A new mascot suit would cost less because it would not need to be designed, but the exact price is unknown. The money would have to come from fundraising or donation, but the details will be discussed by the DPHS Student Council, student leadership, and management team.
“I don’t think anybody would realize that it has that sort of value,” Guttentag said. “It saddens me that somebody thinks that it was potentially of value, [and] … they just threw it away, as opposed to [returning] it. So to me, that’s really the worst case scenario, because then, it’s really gone, as opposed to somebody has it and they’re not quite sure what they want to do with it.”
Perry said that if a student came forward with possessing the stolen Charlie the Charger suit, the consequences would depend on the situation and the student’s intentions.
Guttentag still holds out hope that the suit will appear around graduation, as that is most likely the next time that someone would come forward with the suit if its disappearance was a prank.
