The Tool Chest Heist
Three young men are caught after stealing tool chests from a construction site and selling them to fund a getaway to Victoria.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
Yesterday morning the workmen employed on Squire's new building missed three chests of tools, which had been left in the building the night before. The police were notified, and when the Emma Hayward came down from Tacoma in the afternoon, officer Kelly found the chests in charge of three young men. Upon the arrival of the North Pacific from Tacoma, officers Kelly and Manning arrested the men, who confessed to taking the tools to Tacoma and selling two chests to pay for their passage to Victoria. The youngest, a 14-year-old 'shoe black,' and his two companions, aged 19 and 26, face charges of grand larceny.
“The youngest of the three is about 14 or 15 years old, and is a 'shoe black' by profession.”
Petty theft and the transit-heavy nature of the Puget Sound (with Tacoma-Seattle-Victoria routes) were constants of 19th-century regional crime reporting.
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