PEKIN, Ill. —
Sherlock Holmes can go back to his violin and Dr. Watson to his memoirs.
Randy Price won’t need the famous fictional sleuths to solve the mystery of what happened to 180 feet of valuable copper wire he assumed was stolen over last weekend from a North Fifth Street building he’s remodeling for his business.
The wire wasn’t stolen after all. Yet it’s hard to criticize Price for assuming the worst.
“I’ve never gotten anything done for free,” the owner of Enviro-Safe Refrigerants of Pekin said Thursday.
Price learned with pleasant surprise Wednesday that what he thought was a courteous thief’s mystifying work instead was that of “a young journeyman” for an electrical company with a strong work ethic.
“I’m not going to complain. The guy had good intentions,” Price said.
He summoned police Sunday morning after he stopped by the empty building at 602 N. Fifth, which he’s refurbishing for warehouse and retail use, and noticed the few feet of heavy-gauge wire that had protruded from a small hole high up the one-story building’s side wall was no longer there.
In its place was a cap over the hole that looked to have been professionally installed.
Price concluded that, sometime since Friday night, someone had used a winch or pickup truck to yank the long strand of wire, which had provided the building’s electrical service, out through the hole. He had planned to use its estimated $4,000 in scrap metal value to offset the $10,000 cost to install new wiring in the building.
In a Pekin Daily Times news article Tuesday, Price said he would pay a $500 reward for information leading to the thief’s arrest. He speculated the wire might’ve been taken by someone who thought he was doing an honest job on Price’s behalf for another man who planned to sell the wire.
On Wednesday, Price was called by Schwartz Electric & Sign Co., the Pekin company he’d hired to install the building’s new wiring last month.
The company’s workers had left the wire protruding with plans to pull it out later, Price was told. One worker, however, didn’t know that.
“One of their young guys drove by (the building) and saw the (old) wire hanging out and thought that didn’t look good,” Price said. “He got a bucket truck, went up, pulled out some of it and clipped it, then sealed the pipe. Mystery solved.”
Price said he appreciated the worker’s good intentions. The man need not bother, however, to take a co-worker’s joking advice and ask for the $500 reward. “I’ll keep that.”
