Thieves steal drums from one Seattle nonprofit to donate to another, organization says

The Seattle World Percussion Society has experienced a string of drum thefts stretching back months, but the most recent incident was a bit different than the rest.

“The thieves seemed conflicted about their crime,” Daniel Schmitt, SWPS president, said in a news release sent to McClatchy News.

The thieves broke into a trailer storing several drums and a portable dance floor at Journey Christian Church a few times “but did not seem to leave much missing until on or around August 11,” the release said. On Oct. 12, before the organization could find a safer place to leave it, the suspects stole the trailer itself with around 100 drums inside, according to Schmitt.

“But their conscience seems to have bothered them enough to leave a few for somebody they thought could use them,” Schmitt said in the release.

Surveillance videos showed the thieves leaving a few of the drums at the Seattle Drum School, a nonprofit that offers music lessons to people in “all walks of life,” according to the organization’s website. Most of the stolen drums had been donated or provided at a low cost to the SWPS, and it will cost roughly $10,000 to replace them, Schmitt told McClatchy.

While the organization hasn’t been able to hold events due to COVID-19, the drums were “crucial to our annual festival — we rent them to folks that don’t have drums but want to attend workshops and we loan them to folks to participate in the big closing drum circle,” Schmitt said.

“One of the ways the Seattle World Percussion Society supported music in our region was by providing its dance floor and its inventory of over 100 drums to local drum circle leaders and African dance teachers,” according to the organization.

“You just kind of feel betrayed because obviously it’s somebody from within the community of people we work with,” Schmitt told KIRO. “I mean, why would they be getting drums or stealing them or taking them away or using them and bringing them back and then taking the whole trailer full of them if they’re not actually using them for some reason?”

This story was originally published October 26, 2020 at 5:21 PM with the headline "Thieves steal drums from one Seattle nonprofit to donate to another, organization says."