The Night Custodian Was Fired for Stealing $6,400 in Front of the PTA — Then a Kansas Roofer Stood Up With a Yellow Estimate
Dot Aimes raised Amos Pruitt's timecard over her head in front of ninety parents in the Ellsworth County cafeteria and said the words "You're done."
Amos had swept that cafeteria for eleven years. He was fifty-eight, making $17.40 an hour with no union and no lawyer, and no seat at the meeting he'd been ordered to attend.
Dot said he stole $6,400 from the boiler-repair fund. She called the deputy forward to walk him out.
In the back row sat Hank Delacroix, who owns a rural roofing and boiler shop out of Ellsworth. In April 2019 he had bid a replacement for the school's 1962 boiler: $6,400. He was never called back. He drove past the school most weeks for six years and never once saw a service truck or a pipe section delivered.
Hank unfolded a yellow sheet that had ridden in his truck that whole time.
"Boiler 4 was never replaced," he said. "Ask her to explain her signature on the purchase order."
The folding chairs went silent. The paper pumpkins stapled to the corkboard did not move.
Dot told him it wasn't the place. The room did not agree.
Then Amos asked the board president to let him get something from his locker. He walked down the hall past the boiler room door, where that low hum had run under the whole meeting, and came back with a spiral notebook.
Eleven years of handwritten pressure readings. Every night since 2014. One pencil number per line.
Here is what I first assumed when I saw that notebook.
I assumed a man in a small town was keeping records to protect his own neck. That's what Dot had been saying for weeks — that his readings were a hobby, an obsession, a man in the basement with too much time on his hands. Three times over two years, she said, she had reassured the board the boiler was inspected and cleared.
But there was no inspection entry in that notebook. In the margin, in Amos's hand: "no vendor called — asked D.A. again."
D.A. Dot Aimes.
The board president mentioned the boiler-replacement purchase order had already been paid out — the invoice "must still be with facilities." Not one parent in those folding chairs had ever seen an invoice.
Then Hank read the second document. Dot's own purchase order, marked "BOILER REPLACEMENT — $6,400," signed in her hand, dated November 2023. On the district payment log beside it, the column marked "invoice received" was empty.
The audit later traced the money to a personal credit card tied to a failed home-décor business.
Amos read the last line of his notebook out loud. A reading from March: 235°F, roughly two hundred degrees over safe, in a 1962 boiler, under two hundred children and staff who had done nothing but pull on their coats every morning and walk upstairs.
Beside the number, in pencil: "told D.A. again, no action, kids in Room 4 above."
The deputy's hand was resting on Amos's shoulder.
It moved to Dot's arm.
The district auditor suspended her pending criminal review before the meeting ended. She was walked out past the paper pumpkins stapled to the corkboard. The boiler was shut down that night and a rental unit installed within three days. The board reinstated Amos with back pay in a 4–1 vote.
When the state inspector finally opened that boiler panel in November, they found the firebox warped. They found pitting across the combustion chamber walls.
They found eleven years of readings nobody at the school had ever asked to see.
If you want to read what the district's full audit uncovered — the panel inspection, how close that building came, and what happened to Dot Aimes when the criminal charge was filed — the whole story is in the article below. One thing before you go: those readings were never for his job. They were a promise to the children upstairs.
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