It was a Tuesday night, the regular meeting of Boy Scout Troop 56.
May 17, 2005.
The boys – 11 to 18 – filed into St. Mark United Methodist Church on North Franklin Road to discover someone had broken into the scout room. Equipment and other scout items were heaped in the middle of the room. The place was ransacked.
Scoutmaster Paul Russell took inventory.
Missing were four tents, two black powder pistols, a black powderhorn, a Buckskin outfit Russell had made and needed for the national Jamboree just a few weeks away.
One of the pistols was an antique, worth about $1,400. The other was a replica Russell crafted himself. The pistols were similar to the Kentucky firearms used by Daniel Boone. And they were double loaded with black powder and balls.
Oddly, whoever did the crime took awards and certificates from frames on the wall and then hung the empty frames back up.
The boys were angry. Who steals from the Scouts? In a church? Who could have done this? How did they know this stuff was in there? So many questions.
Russell called the Greenville County Sheriff’s Office. A report was filed. And everyone went about their lives.
Russell quickly made a new buckskin outfit for the Jamboree and continued to lead the troop. Scouting has been in his life since 1959 when he joined the Cub Scouts in Providence, R.I. He is an Eagle scout, as is his 26-year-old son, and has been a scoutmaster in Greenville County since 1973. Russell, 58, is works in maintenance for northern area of the Greenville County Recreation Department.
On a recent Saturday morning, Russell pulled up to the church to meet his scouts for a day of geocaching. Piled up outside the door were most of the things that had been stolen almost six years before.
The tents. The awards. The pistols, still loaded. Sitting out in the open beside the church. The buckskin and a few items Russell considers insignificant were still missing.
“I just about cried,” Russell said. “It floored me.”
He got out his Blackberry and snapped some pictures.
Two notes had been left behind. The person said he had started going to church and felt guilty for what he had done. He wanted to make amends. He wanted forgiveness. He said he couldn’t return all the items because another person with him that day had them.
The note was signed Matthew Price.
Russell searched his records and never had a scout by that name. And, of course, he doesn’t know for sure whether that is the real name of the person who took the items.
“It makes you wonder,” Russell said. “Hopefully he did find religion.”
All of the boys in the 2005 troop have grown up and moved on, but the lesson wasn’t lost on the members of Troop 56. A wrong was done and then made right – to some extent.
A guilty conscience is a powerful thing.
And what of Russell? Does he forgive? Here’s what he said:
“Yes, ma’am. Wouldn’t do me no good to hold it against him. I do wonder who he was with.”
