Online sleuths help recover stolen custom drum set for Maine musician

Evan Casas got his custom honey-colored drum set back after it disappeared from storage for nearly a year, a recovery that came together with help from online sleuths and an undercover police operation. The kit was more than old gear to Casas. It was the set he called “my first real drums,” built by his college friend Scott Ciprari before Ciprari went on to co-found SJC Drums.

The drums were made 25 years ago, when Casas and Ciprari were music education students living in Robie-Andrews Hall on the University of Southern Maine’s Gorham campus. One account says it was the third kit Ciprari ever made for Casas. That detail matters because the set sat at the crossroads of friendship, early craftsmanship and the kind of local music history drummers tend to treasure long after the first gigs are over. Robie-Andrews Hall itself, constructed in 1916, carries its own music pedigree, having been named for Miriam E. Andrews, who taught music at Gorham from 1922 to 1960.

The recovery also pulled in a piece of boutique-drum history. SJC Drums says the company began in 2000 in the Ciprari brothers’ grandmother’s basement, and older coverage places the early operation in Dudley, Massachusetts before it grew into a nationally recognized custom brand. Over time, SJC built a client list that included Dropkick Murphys, Rancid, Sum 41 and Panic! at the Disco, but this kit came from the company’s earliest era, when it was still a basement project and a personal favor between friends.

That is why the theft hit so hard. For Casas, the missing kit was not interchangeable hardware or another shell pack waiting to be replaced. It carried the marks of a specific drummer’s life, from college days in Gorham to years of playing and keeping the set in storage. The unique honey-colored finish and early SJC pedigree also made it easier for people who knew Ciprari’s work to recognize what they were seeing online.

Once the kit turned up in the right hands, the undercover operation brought the story to a close. The same drums that had vanished from storage nearly a year earlier were back with the musician who had held onto them as a first real set, and as a surviving piece of a friendship that started in a dorm hall and helped seed one of the custom-drum names players know now.