4 months ago
A Canadian man tells WGRZ-TV he didn't mean to cause anyone any duress when he removed a statue of Thurman Thomas from a parking lot near Ralph Wilson Stadium following the Bills game against Cleveland this past Sunday.
The statue, standing more than 8-feet tall and estimated to weigh more than 1,000 lbs. was hewn from a tree lost to the "October Surprise" snow storm in 2006.
Carvings For A Cause, which dedicated the statue just before the game in the Erie Community College parking lot, had been searching for it since it disappeared just hours later.
The founder of the group, Therese Forton-Barnes, tells 2 On Your Side that based on a prior tip police were investigating whether the statue may have been carted off to the Cleveland, Ohio area until Monday afternoon when she received a call for a man in Welland, Ontario who told her he had the statue.
"He apologized, ...and he's very upset and sad about the whole story," Forton-Barnes said.
Speaking on the condition of anonymity, the Canadian man explained that the stadium parking lot had pretty much emptied out when he first noticed the statue as he and some friends were also preparing to leave.
"I didn't understand the significance of the statue ...I thought it might have been part of some radio station promotion that was left behind and that no one cared about," he said.
The man then said he noticed some other tailgaters who were disposing hot coals from their grills at the statue's base.
"We brushed the coals off of it and took him (the statue) home because it would have caught fire. So we didn't try and steal it, ...I like to think of us as liberating it."
The man also stated that he and his friends actually had planned to return with the statue at future games and set it up as part of their own tailgating routine.
"I'm a professional in my community and it was never my intention to steal a statue," he said.
In any case, the man claims he and two friends hoisted the statue into the back of his pick up truck (he says it didn't feel like it weighed 1,000 lbs) and proceeded to the Peace Bridge, where he says a border guard asked them the usual questions before turning his attention to the unusual cargo in the back of his truck.
He said the border guard asked what it was.
"I told him , 'it's a statue of Thurman Thomas', ...he didn't ask where we got it though and just waved us through."
The man says he didn't realize there could be a problem with his souvenir until Monday morning when he was driving his son to school.
"I'm driving my kid to school and and I heard it (a story about the search for the statue) on the radio. I came home after a meeting looked it up on the internet and I realized the severity of the situation and called the lady."
The "lady" he referred to, Forton-Barnes, says she believes the man's story and that he is sincere in both his apology and his desire to help return the statue.
Therefore, she is not pressing charges.
"Through the course of this whole thing people were laughing about something so silly but he wasn't laughing about anything, ...he came forward, he admitted it, and didn't try to hide anything. He's doing the right thing," she said.
The man told WGRZ-TV that the Thurman Thomas statue is now "safe and secure" inside a friend's garage at an undisclosed location, and that he is working with Forton-Barnes to arrange for its return.
"We're going to contact the authorities to make sure this will be done properly and smoothly," Forton-Barnes said, in reference to the cross border return trip the statue will have to make.
Meanwhile, Thurman Thomas --the actual person, not the statue-- is also relieved the mystery of his missing likeness has been solved.
"I was happy, because I was getting calls from ESPN, Fox News, and all sorts of television and radio stations to talk about the missing wood," Thomas told 2 On Your Side, while visiting an exhibit on the 50th Anniversary of the Buffalo Bills at the Buffalo and Erie County Historical Society
"It got to be big news, but I didn't really want it to be," Thomas said.
