February 16, 2011
By Staff Reporter
By Patrick Markey
A museum guard has been arrested and charged with stealing a priceless Titanic artifact from the secure glass case where the item was on display.
Staff at Chicago’s Museum of Science and Technology called police after security guard Joshua Jackson reported the leather-bound book missing from its display container two weeks ago. Chicago detectives discovered the booklet in Jackson’s home and arrested him, said Sgt. Cynthia Lance, a Chicago Police Department spokesperson.
"We haven’t established a motive. He didn’t really give us the reason yet," Sgt. Lance said.
The artifact, which bears the title "Maryland Club Rye," is a pocket-sized, leather-bound address book recovered from the sea bed during the 1990s.
Jackson, who is 22, has been charged with felony theft and is scheduled for a preliminary hearing this week.
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The book is one of 300 artifacts on display at the Chicago museum, which borrowed the treasures from RMS Titanic, the U.S. company that dredged the ship’s wreckage two miles beneath the ocean surface.
More than 500,000 people have visited the popular show since it opened in February and reveled in items from the doomed liner such as old bowler hats and rusted binoculars.
A supposedly unsinkable vessel, the Titanic sank after striking an iceberg in 1912. The ship was built in Belfast when Northern Ireland’s ship-building industry was still a booming business.
Many of the 1,200 people who died in the wreckage were Irish immigrants traveling to a new life in America.