Local News, Part 2

The Felon Next Door

The latest incident on our country road was like something out of Dukes of Hazzard. It ended with an arrest, thankfully.

Let me start from the beginning. I got my first whiff that something unusual was going on when I saw a Facebook post, five minutes old, from a neighbor asking what was happening. She’d seen several police cars wending their way up our dirt road, sirens wailing. The answer was in the comments: a criminal on the loose. Lock your doors and arm yourselves. As I was in town, I figured my family would be witnessing the action right about then. At that moment, another neighbor called my cell phone asking whether we were okay. Her daughter had been trying to walk the dogs, only to have police cars blow by her at 80 miles an hour. I assured her that my husband was at home and that my family was fine.

When I got back from town, I heard about the exciting evening in pieces that I assembled like a jigsaw. My husband had indeed armed himself and stood in front of our driveway. The reason became clear later: the fugitive had stopped his car on the road not far above our house and fled into the woods. And he was indeed dangerous: he had started it all by threatening to kill his family, claiming that he was God. Well, the county sheriffs here take those words seriously. So they had apprehended him on the highway, only to have him take off, even carjacking another vehicle at the gas station. “Nope!” was the police’s general response. A giant chase ensued, with around fourteen cars caravanning after the man all over the county, leaving witnesses startled and breathless with curiosity.

Why was it our road that ended up in the news? Well, the man was our neighbor. He lived about a mile and a half up the stretch of dirt above us. Over the last few years, I’d seen some erratic driving and felt uneasy walking alone on our road with the occasional passing truck or SUV. It wasn’t just the bears that made me nervous, either. Little did I suspect that my caution would be warranted in a spectacular way.

As the dust continued to settle, I pieced together more details. When the suspect turned up our lane, he must have been trying to get to his house—for who knows what purpose. The police were having none of it. He reportedly had nine vehicles on his tail when he hit our road. That number was reduced to seven when one officer took out a deer, and another wiped out in the surprise mud pit that had recently been aggravated by attempts from the road department to repair it (they had tried a “just add dirt” recipe, and I’m sure the cops were not amused). This was the second time in a few months that emergency vehicles were thwarted on our road. I wonder whether this will lead to some dramatic mud clean-up project in the next few weeks, just as the time a missing street sign magically appeared after the ambulance couldn’t find an ailing neighbor up behind us. Surely, the road department will heed an irritated sheriff’s office.

The sheriff’s foll0w-up statement online explained why the target was such a high priority for arrest, and how authorities had taken the guy in for a mental evaluation before placing him in the slammer. Our road’s name was mentioned in the report, and commenters were agog at the story. More locally, my husband and cat had enjoyed their busy evening—yes, the cat. My daughter snapped a picture of him peering outside after nightfall, his front paws up on the glass door panel and a black shotgun visible on the couch behind him. Once it was all over, my husband had driven up in his ATV and chatted with the officers, and then had made his rounds of neighbors’ houses, finishing his big night in his safe easy chair at home.

Where else could events have unfolded in quite this way? Civilized, but still a little unpaved around the edges—that’s Big Sky country for you.