An unfortunate set of circumstances has left the mother of a Sumrall High School student who died in a traffic accident last year searching for childhood memoirs of her son, Brandon Cleckler.
Cleckler, a 17-year-old senior who was loved by the SHS students and faculty, died last November when the 2008 Nissan Altima he was driving left the road on Mississippi Hwy. 42 near Sims Road, struck two small trees and overturned.
Cleckler was athletic beginning at an early age, so his mother, Angela Charpentier, decided we would take the team jerseys that she had stored in a cedar chest and have a memory quilt made of them. Unfortunately, the jerseys have now been misplaced and inadvertently donated to Goodwill of Illinois.
“It was horrible,” Charpentier said, describing what she has been trying to do to locate the jerseys. “We haven’t had any luck locating them. I have had several people who messaged me that they had gone to the local Goodwill stores and they are apparently on the sales floor at this time.”
However, Charpentier said because of Goodwill’s massive circulation, the shirts could still be in the process of being distributed.
“From what I have been told, they could be in a warehouse in a bin waiting distribution, but they don’t have the manpower to sort through everything,” she said. “They have pictures of them, and if they come upon them, they’ll let me know. They’ve got alerts out at the stores.”
The confusion came when Brandon’s father, Doyce Cleckler, agreed to have a friend’s mother in Rockford, Illinois, make the memory quilt.
“She got sick and was in the hospital,” Charpentier said. “Her granddaughter, who was living with her, was going through stuff and cleaning out. She didn’t realize what they were because they were in a garbage bag. She accidentally donated them to Goodwill.”
Charpentier said the shirts show her son’s athletic interests throughout his life.
“Some of the shirts were when he was playing T-ball when he was 4 and 5 years old and we had saved those shirts in a cedar chest for all that time,” she said, adding that she set up a Facebook page to try to locate the shirts. “I actually waited for about two weeks after I found out about it and I got to talking with some girls at work about. I didn’t figure there was much chance of ever getting them back. A couple of the girls were like, ‘You know, you could make a Facebook page and see.’ So it’s kind of a last-ditch effort to say I tried everything.”
One thing in the family’s favor is that “Cleckler” is such an unusual name to find on a team T-shirt. However, time has not been on Charpentier’s side.
“The shirts went to Illinois in the spring and the woman was going to make the quilt in the summer,” she said. “The shirts actually got donated around the last week of June. After she got home and realized they were gone, it was another couple of weeks before she realized what happened. When she realized that her granddaughter had donated the items, then she was heartbroken and tried to figure out how to tell Doyce. Of course, he was upset and didn’t want to tell me, so he waited a couple more weeks.”
Charpentier said a manager told Cleckler that the clothes can be distributed in different locations.
“She said when they get donations, some of it goes to the sales floor,” she said. “Some of it goes into various bins in a warehouse and it could be two years before it goes out on the sales floor. They service all the Goodwill stores in their entire district.”
Other alternatives have been mentioned, Charpentier said. “Someone even messaged me that if you wanted to send the pictures, you could get a quilt made out of the pictures of him wearing the shirts,” she said.
However, Charpentier said she believes the shirts may be missing for a reason.
“At this point, I would like to get the shirts back, but God uses everything to try to teach us something,” she said. “The one thing that I maybe learned from all of this is He showed me that you can’t hold on to worldly things anyway. If I get the shirts back, it’s not going to bring Brandon back; it’s just a memory I had of him anyway.”
Anyone who finds Brandon's T-shirts can reach Charpentier at (601) 850-3812 or her Facebook page.
