It’s been more than a year since that little incident I had near Woodside, but somebody recently commented on that blog entry and it reminded me of a couple of things I had been meaning to post about.
The police never did find the guy who slashed my tires. I went home that evening and never heard from them again, so I just assumed that he had gotten away (which was pretty much already the case when I left).
A few months ago (in October 2007) I talked to Emery County Sheriff’s deputy Ray Jeffs, who was one of the responding officers during the incident. I was in Buckhorn Wash doing some geocaching with some friends, and he stopped to talk to my wife and friends while I was about 20 yards away in the truck getting the kids some lunch. Somehow the subject of Woodside came up in their conversation, and he started telling them about this incident that happened near there the previous year–he hadn’t recognized me or my truck at that point, but as soon as the subject came up, my wife mentioned that we knew all about the incident near Woodside.
I strolled over there and Deputy Jeffs told me that he had patrolled that area for several days after the incident–driving the road along the Price River, and also the Little Park area above the Book Cliffs. He also knocked on the door at Jason Pogue’s “residence” (a motorhome) at Woodside, but nobody answered the door. Apparently the sheriff’s office suspected Jason Pogue, but they had no evidence to prove it, so they couldn’t do much except try to question him about it.
I heard from a friend about another incident near Woodside in which somebody was parked along the river bottom somewhere and had a camera stolen out of his vehicle while he was away from it. The police were called into that situation as well, but didn’t catch anybody that time either.
Oh yeah, one more thing–a couple of days after the Woodside incident, I was looking again at the pictures I took and realized that I had actually taken a couple of pictures of the Crazy Man. I had been taking pictures of Michael and Bradley as they hiked down the trail, and incidentally the truck was in several of those pictures. In two of them, you can make out a dark figure next to the truck. The images below were cropped at 100%, then enlarged nearly 2X, so yeah, they’re blurry.

The first image (left) shows the truck by itself, with a pile of rocks and a thick fencepost in the left side of the image. The second image shows a dark but indistinct figure hunched down near the passenger side of the truck. The third image, however, clearly shows the guy standing upright next to the driver’s door (click here to view the full-sized image [3.3MB]). It was just a few seconds after taking that picture that I noticed him standing there, and that’s when the shit hit the fan.
I suppose the lesson in all of this is not to leave your vehicle unattended anywhere near Woodside, Utah.
Followup Post:
Eff Yeah – They caught the guy!