Normally you find articles like this reported on the back pages, unnoticed unless you were looking for them. But this incident needs to be noticed by parents and especially by our children. Please share this with the children.

We live in a community. The Carle Place Little League belongs to us all. Some parents played little league here and enjoy watching their children play on the same fields. Many of us had several children go through the system and fondly remember many evenings sitting in the bleachers cheering them on.

So when somebody hurts the Little League, they hurt us all, parent and child. When older children litter our fields with beer cans and bottles, their parents and younger siblings have to clean up their mess before they can play baseball. And when somebody destroys Little League property, it affects us all.

On Friday, Aug. 18 at 11:30 p.m. somebody broke into the Little League shed at Asbury Field, or what we fondly call 8th Street Field. They removed equipment from the shed, scattered it around the park and then went a senseless step further. They set the remaining equipment on fire. Bags of equipment, a pitching machine, and bases, just to name a few, were completely destroyed. Plastic helmets and catcher's equipment melted into a puddle on the floor of the shed by a fire so intense that the paint was burned off the walls. A brand new shed is now rusting because of this damage and the water needed to extinguish the fire.

As a community we all suffered this loss. The total damage is close to $5,000. This figure does not include the shed or the electrical connection for the sprinklers. Little League insurance does not cover arson. Somebody will have to pay to replace this equipment. Money scheduled for new uniforms or additional equipment must now be spent replacing what was destroyed. What hurts most is that this terrible crime was committed by our own children. Children who probably played at that field. The same children whose little brothers will play there next year. And because they are our children, we share the shame of this senseless act against our own neighbors.

Frank Voce,

President Carle Place Little League