Santa Barbara District Attorney’s Office Surprises Arizona Family with Gift, Donation

Around Christmas of 2016, Megan Chanda unwrapped the custom blanket she’d ordered online, expecting to see it emblazoned with photos of her recently deceased dog. Instead, the blanket featured a collage of a smiling family of strangers. The blanket company didn’t want the mistakenly sent blanket returned, so Chanda — a senior deputy district attorney — decided it would make the perfect white elephant gift at the Santa Barbara District Attorney’s Office holiday party. “Everyone thought it was hilarious,” she said. “It was kind of a hit, and it has made a comeback every year since.”

Little did Deputy District Attorney Chanda know that nearly a decade later, her office would not only identify the mysterious family, but help them during a difficult time. 

The blanket became a running gag in the District Attorney’s office. Every December, the previous year’s white elephant recipient would wrap the blanket up and bring it back to the holiday party. At first, Chanda said, her colleagues made no effort to conceal the blanket’s identity, but after some years, they started disguising it in unexpected containers and creative wrapping. They also began a tradition of signing the back of the blanket with a fabric marker upon receiving it. 

In 2025, Chief Investigator Kristina Perkins decided to attempt to find the family on the blanket. She approached Investigator Eric Davis, who works in the Digital Evidence unit, for assistance. 

“I’m our cyber crimes guy, I do a lot of online stuff, so one of the things I specialize in is figuring out who people are, ID’ing people, that type of stuff,” Davis said. He was a natural fit for the task. But he warned Perkins that it wouldn’t necessarily be easy to identify the family, because “they’re photos on a blanket, they’re not very high-resolution.”

Davis photographed the blanket and used open-source tools, such as Google Image Search, to look for the family. “Those searches can be very hard to do. They can take a long time, multiple days of looking,” he said. “And that’s the weird fate of all of this, because instantly, we got a match on one of the photos in just a matter of seconds.”

The mystery was answered — the blanket featured the Kluver family, who live in Arizona. After the initial surprise, Davis and Perkins were saddened to learn that it had been an extremely challenging year for the Kluvers. In February 2025, father and husband Casey Kluver was diagnosed with late-stage metastatic melanoma, an extremely aggressive skin cancer. 

The “immediate thought,” said Davis, was to do something to help the family. Perkins coordinated an office-wide donation drive to assist the family, which achieved widespread participation.

“They found my family’s GoFundMe that our other family had set up for us earlier this year, and they made a very large donation,” said Angie Kluver, Casey’s wife, in a TikTok video describing the events. “Not only that, they, on the 23rd, got my mom’s address, and they overnighted the blanket back to us so we could have it on Christmas.”

“I think it was just meant to be that we chose this year to figure out who the blanket belonged to,” said Chanda. She said she was thrilled to see her colleagues join together to support the Kluver family, but she wasn’t at all surprised. “This is just who we are and who the people that we work with are. It’s a pretty special office,” she said. 

“I want people to know that there are still good people out there, and you just never know that somewhere out there, you might be secretly changing someone’s life for the better,” said Angie Kluver. 

Casey Kluver’s fight against cancer is ongoing. Casey is “an incredible father and a devoted husband, and his family is his world,” wrote his brother. “Now it’s our turn to rally behind him.” Donations can be made to support Casey at gofundme.com/f/support-casey-kluvers-fight-against-cancer.