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SALT LAKE CITY — In 1977, 16-year-old Richard Pittenger was on a dinner date with a girl and parked his truck near 1700 S. State.
When he returned to his vehicle, the back window was broken out and the Remington Wingmaster 20-gauge shotgun his father had bought for him that was placed on the gun rack in his window, was gone.
On Wednesday, 37 years after that burglary, Salt Lake police reunited Pittenger with his stolen gun after it was recently discovered at a sporting goods store in Albany, Oregon.
"C'mon, that was so long ago. You gotta be kidding me," was Pittenger's initial reaction when police called him to tell him they had recovered his shotgun.
The key to getting it back was that Pittenger had written down the gun's serial number in 1977 and given it to police, who put into their national database.
"This is by far the oldest (piece of recovered stolen property) that I've ever come across. It's just a cool story," said Salt Lake police detective Rod Van Scoy who was contacted by Oregon state troopers.
The break came when employees at a sporting goods store in Oregon ran a check on the shotgun and discovered that it had been reported stolen. They contacted local police who then called Von Scoy.
The detective then had to go through old microfilm to look at police reports filed in the '70s. Pittenger's father has since died. But Von Scoy found his mother, who Pittenger said was more excited about the recovery of the shotgun than he was.
In fact, he said he admitted he was a bit nervous at first when police called him.
"Little bit a trepidation, get a voicemail from a Salt Lake police detective saying he wants to talk to you," Pittenger said. "It was a little scary. Then he told me why he was calling.
"Thirty-seven years, talk about a cold case. The detective having to go through the microfilm, that's got to be a tedious process. To put in the time to do that, that's really cool of him to do that," he said.
Amazingly, the shotgun was still in mint condition when it was recovered.
"In 37 years, this could have exchanged hands 10 times. Who knows?" Von Scoy said.
Pittenger's gun exchanged hands at least three times that the detective knows of. He said the case is still being investigated to determine who sold it to the sporting goods store. Police would then try to re-trace the shotgun's nearly four-decade journey back to when it was taken from Pittenger's truck.
For Pittenger, seeing and holding the shotgun that he used to hunt rabbits with as a youth brought back memories.
"It just takes me back to those days and what I was doing and what I was feeling. It was just a different time of my life. So it's good to go back and relive some of that," he said.
This is what makes our jobs as robbery crimes detectives meaningful, and it's really a pleasure that we can return property to victims. If you have a serial number, it might take 37 years but we'll get your property back — hopefully, eventually.
–Salt Lake police detective Rod Van Scoy
As for the future of the gun, Pittenger, who says he is still in disbelief, wasn't sure Wednesday what he would do with the shotgun or whether he'd use it again, partly because he doesn't know who had the weapon or what it was used for.
"I don't know the history of it. I don't know if it was used to hurt somebody over the years. So there's a little bit of a weird feeling about that. So eventually I'll take it out, but it's going to be a long time before I do something like that," he said.
Von Scoy said the case is a great reminder of why it's so important to write down and store the serial numbers of valuable items. Currently, the Salt Lake City Police Department has "unbelievable amounts" of unclaimed property sitting in its building. "It's rooms after rooms after rooms of stolen property that we don't know who it belongs to because we don't have serial numbers," he said.
And without a serial number for a gun, Salt Lake City's policy for unclaimed, recovered stolen weapons is to destroy them rather than auction them back into the public.
"This is what makes our jobs as robbery crimes detectives meaningful, and it's really a pleasure that we can return property to victims," Von Scoy said. "If you have a serial number, it might take 37 years but we'll get your property back — hopefully, eventually."
The Salt Lake City Police Department suggests using home inventory sheets to keep track of personal property.
