As Jackie Robinson statue returns to Wichita, so do lessons learned

WICHITA, Kansas — Six months ago, the city had a problem. In the cover of night, someone pulled up to McAdams Park with a pickup truck, sawed off the figure at the feet and hauled it away. The security camera footage is legitimately difficult to watch. A bunch of shadowy figures shuffling around the plaza on 17th Street, then suddenly the majestic figure comes crashing down to the platform, bouncing slightly from the impact.

It’s one thing to know in your mind that the hundreds of kids who play baseball and look up to the statue would no longer have their icon to look at. It’s quite another to see the actual footage of the theft and the grisly footage of a severed Robinson head burning on the ground.

“When I got down there, there were a lot of officers already on scene,” Lt. Drew Seiler of the Wichita Police Department said of the theft. “We had officers over at League 42 building reviewing video footage over the past 24 hours. The area had been cordoned off. We had started CSIs to the location to collect any physical evidence as well as document the scene as it was when we found it.

“This is the first where I’ve seen the physical statue removed the way it was. And it’s appalling because we deal a lot with thefts from cemeteries. We’ll have persons go into a cemetery and cut off those brass candleholders or flower holders that are stuck on either side of a headstone.”

He was put in charge of the case, which he says he treated like a homicide, with extensive time and energy put into finding the perpetrators. When I first heard of this case, it seemed like a clear case of someone going out of their way to defile a Robinson-related monument, which happens with enough frequency that the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum in Kansas City, Missouri, has an entire exhibit dedicated to them.

But after spending time there, the reality of the situation is much more sad than what we initially believed on the surface. The sheer amount of desperation it takes to try to scrap an entire statue for the metal, no matter who it is, is such a grim reminder of the circumstances that many are faced with in 2024. A shortsighted, mean-spirited decision ultimately driven by substance abuse affected tons of people and concluded with one life effectively being ended, when Ricky Alderete was sentenced to 15 years in the theft, plus a host of other previous accusations.

Not that this was anything new for Seiler — not remotely.

“You and I, we probably live a different lifestyle than the person we had identified had done this,” Seiler explained as placidly as possible. “So, what you and I consider as normal behavior is different than the persons who were involved with this. And going through this investigation, the sentimental value of what Jackie Robinson represents — not only for this youth program, for our city, but for our state and our nation, what he does for sports, and the doors that were opened — the sentimental value that he brings in was never felt. It wasn’t even considered, is what I gathered through talking with the detectives and the officer that had done the follow-up with all of our leads. That was never a consideration. It was the value of the physical object.”

As angry and annoyed as I feel as a Black person and a baseball fan, there’s also a part of me as a human that’s just embarrassed to see a group of people trying to pull off an Ocean’s Eleven-level caper with only Scooby Doo-level skills, for drugs, effectively.

“Wichita is not the yellow brick road that everyone thinks with the tumbleweed blowing around,” councilmember and native son Brandon Johnson explained. “You know, we are a big city, the biggest city in Kansas. A great city. Our strength is our people. When you walk around, you don’t see people just ignoring you. Everyone smiles at you. You might get a few waves.

“There’s a lot of opportunity here. And growing up here was fun. You know, we made the most out of it, even though I was poor. And that’s kind of like my focus now, is making sure that our lower-income communities have the same opportunity.”

In an election year, particularly one held during the Olympics, Wichita is a stark reminder of what America’s drug problem actually looks like. It isn’t just fictional Walter White of the Breaking Bad TV series running around New Mexico, a bunch of rich kids at Los Angeles high school parties or the drug lord Ghost of Power trying to go legit with his business.

It’s a grown man, a career criminal — a poor one at that — attempting to fuel his fentanyl addiction with a dastardly, daring caper. He wasn’t alone, but he was the one who got caught. Even with the return of the statue Monday to McAdams Park to much fanfare, there’s still something about this outcome that feels so sad.

Maybe it’s because Alderete is around the same age as me. Maybe it’s because I’ve had friends lose their lives to accidental drug overdoses. Or maybe it’s because his life as he knows it is effectively done.

“I let fentanyl take over me and made a lot of poor decisions. I am not going to deny that. I never meant to hurt anybody. I am embarrassed, I’m ashamed. Whatever you do today I accept,” he told the Wichita Eagle. “I am ready for that. I believe I am where I am supposed to be right now because at the rate I am going, I might have been dead.”

He got 15 years.

“For someone to think they can go scrap it and just make a few dollars, to view it as meaningless as, ‘let’s just go make a few dollars,’ it’s more disappointing and hurtful,” Johnson lamented.

In short, part of this doesn’t particularly feel like a happy ending. For all the opportunity in Kansas, the despair is obvious to see. Seeing people walking down the street after a certain time of day likely means that they don’t have anywhere else to stay. The margins that people slip through are ones that people should be allowed back from.

“I’d not only invite him to the unveiling, I’d say do you have a baseball background. How can we make this story a success story for you so that you don’t have to spend the rest of your life being a villain?’ So, it would be very cool,” Lutz said. “But if he’s sitting in a jail cell right now, repentant about what he has done and would like to tell us, he should have that opportunity. And if he wanted to go beyond that and become a part of League 42, we wouldn’t be following the Jackie Robinson model if we denied that.”

While the symbolism and uplifting are all great, it is still ultimately just a statue. It can be rebuilt. And since the mold still exists, even though John Parsons the sculptor, a friend of Lutz, has since died, that’s exactly what they did — 560 miles away, in Loveland, Colorado.

Tony Workman is standing in his foundry, Art Castings of Colorado, looking at one of his crew polishing the bronze head of Jack Roosevelt Robinson. Right next to it sits a breastplate with the iconic scripted Brooklyn Dodgers logo and No. 42, for the second baseman whose metal likeness is receiving a second chance at life.

“We go through 100,000 pounds of metal a year,” Workman said.

He’s explaining the ever-complicated process of making a statue. The smell of metal work is unforgettable. For them, it’s just another statue. They do tons. Tom Osborne outside of Memorial Stadium in Lincoln, Nebraska. Willie Mays outside of Oracle Park in San Francisco. Roberto Clemente in Pittsburgh. The list goes on.

“The first step in the process, guys get all the rubber into the molds. That gets all the detail,” Workman said as we toured the facility among the farmlands. “And if you’ve ever built a candle, you’ll pour wax, with three-sixteenths-inch wall thickness. That’s the thickness of the wax and eventually of the metal. On bigger pieces like the Jackie Robinson, I think that’s cast in eight pieces. We don’t just cast full-size figures.”

The whole thing is very gritty, noisy and frankly, physically dangerous, reminding you of the kind of lengths people go through to both make an honest living as well as to feed addictions. Even if they were not pumping out figures of all types, it would take a month to build the Robinson statue, he said.

On Monday at McAdams Park, the community and League 42 celebrated the return of their centerpiece.

“There’s not much you can do if somebody puts their mind into stealing stuff and, what, copper prices the way they are,” Workman said. “The only problem with stealing a sculpture is you can’t take it down into a small enough component that people don’t realize it’s a sculpture, right? And every scrap dealer in America knows it’s a no-no to take that. You know, if you’re gonna commit a crime that’s usually not the best and brightest, but they tried it.”

Hopefully, the lessons learned from this entire ordeal can help more than just one Little League, one city or one foundry. Hopefully we can remember that there are ways to help each other so that it never comes to this ever again — for anyone.