James Tully of Canadensis, who has to walk to work in the heart of the Eric Frein search area, has been stopped by police more than 20 times, including an encounter Friday night when he says he was roughed by an officer.
Posted on 10/21/2014 1:47:36 PM PDT by Bettyprob
James Tully of Canadensis, who has to walk to work in the heart of the Eric Frein search area, has been stopped by police more than 20 times, including an encounter Friday night when he says he was roughed by an officer.
Police searching for Eric Frein have questioned James Tully so many times that he started carrying his driver’s license and work identification on a neck lanyard to prove his identity.
But that wasn’t enough to keep him from being forced to the ground by gunpoint Friday on Route 447, and being held there, face down in the gravel, by a law enforcement officer driving a knee into his back, Tully said.
Tully, 39, lives off Snow Hill Road in Canadensis which has been a key area in the search for fugitive Eric Frein, the man accused of ambushing the police barracks In Blooming Grove on Sept. 12, fatally shooting a state trooper and injuring another.
A father of two, Tully has held a job at J.A. Reinhardt on Spruce Cabin Road, in Mountainhome for more than a year. He keeps up on his child support payments and barely makes the rest of his bills.
Tully does not own a car. The five-mile walk takes two hours each way. He walks to work in the early afternoon and walks home from midnight until 2 a.m. It hasn't been easy, Tully has a bad knee and sometimes walks with a brace and a limp.
The walk takes him along Route 447, a hot spot in the search for Frein. Since the search began, Tully has been stopped well over 20 times and questioned by law enforcement officers. Tully says he's been questioned as much as seven times during a round-trip walk to and from work.
Until Friday, it has usually been the same. Law enforcement rolls up and asks for his name and identification, where he is coming from, where he works, and then they move on. Some have asked him to keep his eyes and ears open for Frein and Tully did report a suspicious person to police once, since the search started.
Tully left work around midnight Friday and about 25 feet from his job’s driveway, police stopped and questioned him as usual.
A co-worker saw him and gave him a lift off Spruce Cabin Road to Route 447 where he walked for five minutes before another routine police questioning. He continued on for 10 more minutes and was near Brinkers Bridge near the intersection of Route 447 and Mill Creek Road when a silver SUV stopped.
"The driver jumped out screaming like a lunatic,” Tully said. He was dressed in camouflage and a tactical vest and had a rifle held high, pointing at Tully.
He did not see a badge or words on clothing. The man did not identify himself.
“The only I.D. I saw was the barrel of the gun,” Tully said.
“He yelled at me to get down on the ground with my arms out wide and he demanded my name.”
Tully says he complied immediately and that the man drove his knee into Tully’s back and continued to ask his name.
Tully told him his name over and over and explained that his identification was on the lanyard on his neck but that he was laying on it.
The law enforcement officer removed the bandana from Tully’s head and then grabbed the lanyard and yanked it off his neck.
“Good thing it had a break away clasp or he would have choked me.”
He continued to badger Tully.
“I will break you right here. What is your name?” the man asked, while still driving a knee into his back, Tully said.
Tully did not know where the gun was but he was afraid the man would shoot him.
“From the minute I saw him with that gun I thought, let me survive this.”
This went on for what seemed like 15 minutes or more when a state trooper who recognized Tully from previous questioning arrived and told the other officer that Tully was telling the truth about his name.
The trooper held out a hand and helped Tully stand up and helped him gather the items he had been carrying, which were scattered on the ground.
No one apologized.
It is unclear what agency the other officer is working with because Tully does not recall seeing any identification on the vehicle or the man’s clothing, and state police did not answer questions about this incident in time for this report.
The FBI, ATF, and US Marshall service are helping state police in the search.
“The trooper took a photo of me and my I.D. and said he would show it to searchers in the morning briefing,” Tully said.
Then, with scrapes and bruising on his bad knee, and pain in his back, Tully limped the rest of the way home.
He walked to work the next day, and was stopped three times. A trooper strongly advised Tully to find a different way to work, but the only other route for Tully is to walk through the woods. That would be even more suspicious. He cannot afford to give anyone money for gas and his parents, who live in Bushkill, cannot drive at night. He is out of options.
Tully did not finish his shift because he started to notice pain while breathing. He was taken to the hospital and learned that his ribs are bruised from the encounter.
He hopes police will pay for the time he had to take off work and for the X-rays and other medical expenses.
“We understand they have a job to do. Bur there are certain protocols,” said Bob Tully, James Tully’s father. “This guy apparently had delusions of grandeur that he would be the one to catch Frein. We completely commiserate with the police but this guy went full commando on my son.”
His mother, Linda Waddington Tully, bought a reflective vest, hat and gloves which he will now wear during the walk.
“Frein isn’t going to be wearing that,” she said. “I believe if not for that state trooper, he could have killed him.”
James Tully says he is having a hard time sleeping at night and he is nervous to walk to work now. “I’m worried about what is going to happen with the next one. Is he going to shoot first and ask questions later?”
In 2004, Frein was charged with burglary and grand larceny after he was accused of stealing items from vendors at a World War II reenactment in Odessa, New York. He failed to attend his trial and was arrested in Pennsylvania as a fugitive from justice.[10] In lieu of $5,000 bail, Frein was held for 109 days in a county jail in New York on a felony charge before pleading guilty to a misdemeanor charge of possession of stolen property to be sentenced to time served and payment of $3,120 restitution.
During a shift change late at night on September 12, 2014, outside the Troop R barracks of the Pennsylvania State Police in the Pocono Mountains in the Township of Blooming Grove, Pennsylvania, a sniper opened fire with a .308-caliber rifle,[18] killing Corporal Bryon K. Dickson II, a 38-year-old Pennsylvania State Police trooper, and critically injuring trooper Alex Douglass.
This story is very strange. After failing to appear he was granted bail of a measly 5k?? And then in the end it’s a misdemeanor charge? What was wrong with their case? What happened in Penn when he was arrested for failing to appear for this weak misdemeanor case? Is this guy just nuts? What do we not know?
Please delete my 40. I didn’t see that he had a disability until after I posted.
Maybe no friendly fire but a few of them have climbed old deer stands and fell out and air lifted to the ER.
I really think that they are using this for live training as all I hear is that they are importing troopers from every municipality in PA.
People are really getting tired of this.
Hell the guy came out of the woods a day or so ago and was spotted by some women where he went to school at. She said he had mud on his face and was carrying a rifle. The dogs picked up his sent and lost it shortly after.
I know a couple of hunters that could do better.
At a modest 3 mph walk, it would take less than 2 hours.
“With all this publicity, does anyone imagine Frein would hang around?”
Only the PSP .
Maybe so but when you are looking over your shoulder and not straight ahead it would tend to slow you down a bit.
Sounds like the peasant was getting "uppity".
That'll teach him to talk back to our Owners' hired muscle...
I apologize for any offense; it was certainly not intentional. I read the first two words of the title, "Canadensis man," and they sounded to yours truly, AKA all-puns-all-the-time, similar to the terms used by paleoanthropologists for prehistoric peoples. There was no intention on my part to make any reference to any person or item in the article itself.
Fascinating, as Spock would say...
I guess he is doing the best he can given the circumstances.
Keep on task. Hate the Police State.
Spot-on.
"Tully has a bad knee and sometimes walks with a brace and a limp."
Aw c’mon this is too easy. If I was born in a Communist country this would mean Communism was right, wouldn’t it?
The “I was born here” is like a soap bubble. As are all our lives when without God. That is just metaphysical reality.
Ahhh, isn’t shoot first, aim second what it’s all about for gamecocks?
The drill, for the observant, is to mash Abuse on your own post then explain why you want it gone.
He's working and barely scraping by while making his child support payments. That's more than a lot of men are doing today.
Even the cops have to be thinking about the Christmas shopping season that's just around the corner. Think of all the overtime they're getting. Someone recently made the observation that at the end of shift no one has mud or dirt on their knees. That tells me they're not going about this properly. I don't know why they haven't brought in bloodhounds. I would think a dozen or so would find him in short order. It's almost like Obama is running this show.
Hit the “abuse” button and tell the mods why you want that post removed. Pinging them rarely works.
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