Church Bell’s Return Leaves Echo of Mystery

Pastor Samuel Pratts was tending the flower bed in front of the Church of the Foothills when a man and woman quietly walked up to him. One of them was carrying a large suitcase.

If these strangers were angels, they were in disguise.

“The pastor said they had that homeless look about them,” said Lou D’Alessandro, vice president of the 200-member congregation. “They had tattered clothes. They didn’t look like they had much money.”

They did not introduce themselves.

“They said, ‘We have something for you,’ ” D’Alessandro continued, describing the incident last weekend. “ ‘We have an old friend of yours.’ ” Then they opened the suitcase.

Inside was the church bell that had been stolen last month from the building’s tower.

The bell had no great monetary value--Pratts got it free a dozen years ago from a farmer in Wisconsin. “It’s just a steel bell,” the minister said in an interview after it was stolen. “It’s not a brass bell that you can melt down into something else.”

But he liked the unusual shape of the weathered bell, and the congregation readily took to it. Some members even wrote poems about it.

The bell had been painted black since the pastor last saw it, but otherwise it seemed undamaged.

“They told him they knew it was our bell because they had seen it in the news after it was stolen,” D’Alessandro said. “They said they had bought it from someone off the street for $20.”

No further explanations were offered. The pastor told the man and woman, who both appeared to be in their 20s, that he wanted to reimburse them, but they refused to accept money. He asked their names, but they didn’t want to give them.

“They left very quickly,” D’Alessandro said.

In their wake they left not only the bell but a mystery.

“We have no idea what really happened to the bell, who took it,” he said. “Maybe someone painted it black to disguise it. Maybe whoever took it realized it didn’t have much value.

“Maybe it was this couple that took it and then felt bad about it. We have no idea.”

Last year, there was another church-bell theft in the Valley, and although that bell was also returned, the aftermath of the theft was less pleasant. It turned out that a group of fraternity pledges from Pi Kappa Alpha at Cal State Northridge had taken the historic bell from the San Fernando Mission.

The university banned the frat from holding social activities or participating in campus functions for one year.

The Sylmar church is likely to be more forgiving if the thieves who took its bell are ever discovered.

“The church is very, very happy to get the bell back,” D’Alessandro said. “That’s what we wanted.”

On Sunday, the church will rededicate the bell with an outdoor ceremony immediately after regular services.