A National Guard member who stole World War II-era dog tags from the National Archives and Records Administration was sentenced to 18 months of supervised probation on Wednesday.
Robert Rumsby, a Virginia National Guard sergeant from Fredericksburg, Virginia faced a maximum sentence of 1 year of incarceration after he pleaded guilty in November to one misdemeanor count of theft.
Rumsby took the dog tags of four U.S. airmen killed in plane crashes in 1944. One of the sets of dog tags belonged to the great uncle of Rumsby's wife — the dog tags were given to his wife's grandmother as a Christmas present. The other sets of dog tags were similarly returned to a relative of that serviceman, according to the original complaint.
Virginia man pleads guilty in WWII dog tags theft
Rumsby told the Associated Press in November that he hoped NARA would "do the right thing" now that they had "the broader story" regarding his attempts to return the dog tags to family members.
"I want to give NARA a fair opportunity to do the right thing as well, now that the broader story has hit the public," Rumsby wrote in an email to the Associated Press.
Also last year, a Maryland researcher was sentenced to 364 days in prison after it was discovered that he had been pocketing and selling artifacts from the same National Archives in College Park, Maryland for years. Antonin DeHays made more than $43,000 selling WWII-era dog tags, military ID cards, personal letters from family, photographs, and handwritten intelligence reports.
A researcher pocketed hundreds of WWII dog tags from the National Archives and sold them
Rumsby will also have to pay a $5,000 fine. He is assigned to the Virginia National Guard's 116th Infantry Brigade Combat Team. National Guard spokesman A. A. "Cotton" Puryear said Rumsby's unit leaders were tracking the criminal case.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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