Can anyone provide an alibi for Rachel Robinson?
It’s always the spouse.
Yes, she’s still alive, she’s 101!
Or maybe it was.
My WAG here… They stole it planning to sell it for scrap, even cut it up to make it easier to transport. Then they realized that it was too “hot” and taking it to any scrapyard would get them busted, so they disposed of it, and burned it to try to remove any physical evidence.
I’ve been thinking that all along, and waiting to see some evidence there was any motive besides greed. If they wanted to desecrate a statue they had many simpler ways to do that available.
I don’t know whether to be relieved this may have only been common greed instead of a willful hate crime, or disappointed.
I guess the former. Greed we will have always, but I need to hold hope that hate will eventually be overcome.
I don’t think greed is the right word. Desperation is more like it. Bronze scrap price is about $2.30 a pound. No one is stealing it to get rich. They are stealing it to get their next fix.
Update:
The only thing left of the statue after it was stolen were the shoes. Those shoes have now been donated to the Negro Leagues Museum in Kansas City.
I hope they can have a new sculpture made. Perhaps using the bronze recovered from the first one. Maybe fill it with reinforced concrete this time.
How about not making the new statue from bronze? What alternatives are there that don’t involve a metal valuable for recycling? Perhaps cast in concrete or stone?
There are probably a lot of bronze statue plans being re-thought. It could easily be cast in concrete. I suggested filling with concrete to make it hard for thieves to cut through and move. I hope they replace the statue somehow so the thiefdom doesn’t get to mark this up as a win or even a draw.
The remnants were found burning in a trash can and were deemed not salvageable.
A replacement statue is being made at a foundry in Colorado, IIRC. I could not find a source that stated what the material would be for the new statue.
Don’t know how bronze becomes unsalvageable. You just melt it down again to re-use. I assume they meant the statue was unsalvageable, not the metal. Otherwise it wouldn’t have been stolen.
Probably. Here’s the quote to which I was referring:
The remains of the statue were found by the Wichita Fire Department on Tuesday dismantled, burned and unsalvageable in a small trash fire.
Source:
Like I said said above it’s valuable only in a way that tweakers and junkies might consider valuable. I’ve see articles that put the value of the statue at $75,000 but that’s as a piece of art from a deceased artist. As scrap it’s worth about $750 (300 lbs at $2.50 per pound). Since multiple people were needed to (literally) pull this off that’s at most a couple hundred dollars per tweaker at best. The potential payoff was not worth the risk. Obviously they knew they couldn’t just bring the statue in for scrap but didn’t have the equipment or know how to melt it down.
This sort of thing can happen.
But I don’t think that happened in this case, I believe it takes time, unless they tried to use a chlorine-based cleaner to remove fingerprints or something and it happened quickly.
Interesting. I want to reread the article, it wasn’t clear whether melting will eliminate the contaminates.
One of the thieves pled guilty to multiple charges. He could be sentenced to a long stay in prison.
The charges are more serious than I expected. It’ll be interesting to see what he gets at sentencing.
I’m relieved it wasn’t a hate crime. Scrap metal theft is a growing problem. But this was the first time I remember a statue on display being stolen. It’s value in scrap metal is negligible compared to the replacement costs.
The judge apparently is using an estimated replacement value for sentencing.
So one guy was caught, but what about the others? The story mentions a “crew” so I wonder if this first one will help bring in the others in exchange for reducing that sentence.
It’s definitely not the first time a statue was stolen for the scrap value. Here, for example, is a story about a stolen Henry Moore piece.