I guess the paramilitary wing of Up With People is at it again.
A Fremont Bomb maker?
Kind of a casual way to put it.
I thought copper yielded an IUD?
A CPDIED.
ping
Dude, how much freakin' wire did you need? There had to be a friendly Radio Shack store nearby.
I’d be curious to know if the majority of the copper thieves were drug addicts.
Wow.
It's happening everywhere:
Daring Copper Theft Foiled In Baldwin County
Authorities say men used boat and ladder to strip valuable wire from Tensaw River train trestle
Thursday, January 24, 2008
By DAVID FERRARAStaff Reporter
The police report reads like a scene from "Mission: Impossible" that was left on the cutting room floor.
Three Mobile County men hopped in a small boat and pointed it up the Tensaw River, the Baldwin County Sheriff's Office said Wednesday.
The trio arrived near the Crossroads community -- in a swampy area known as Tensaw Island -- sometime Tuesday morning. They were wearing dark clothing and at least one was in a wet suit and gloves, in case he needed to hide in the chilly waters.
They hoisted a ladder against the trestle under the train tracks along the bank of the river. One man reached the top of the ladder and shimmied up the trestle, according to Baldwin County Sheriff's Col. Charlie Jones.
While one man stood lookout, another used a wire cutter to clip copper from a post along the tracks, "dropping it to the third suspect on the ground who would roll it up and hide it out of sight until it could be retrieved," a release from the Sheriff's Office stated.
"It's extremely dangerous, but apparently they were willing to take the risk," Jones said.
Investigators aren't yet sure how long this continued before a CSX railroad worker called about the suspicious behavior, Jones said.
Soon after that, about 11 a.m. Tuesday morning, two deputies were in pursuit with the CSX employee, riding in a car specially equipped for the rails.
As they approached, the deputies spotted three men running from the area.
Within minutes, they found three men lying face down in the swamp, about 50 feet from the tracks.
The Sheriff's Office said that deputies later discovered $4,800 worth of copper wire --about 9,000 feet -- that the men had allegedly tried to steal.
As a safety precaution, the railroad traffic was shut down briefly four about 1½ hours Tuesday, Jones said. CSX officials did not return phone messages Wednesday.
The men charged with first-degree theft of property, first-degree criminal mischief and third-degree criminal trespass are Claude Thomas Tillman, 34, of Mobile; Leonard Wittner, 36, of Irvington; and James Lee Dowdle, 18, of Irvington.
According to online court records from Mobile County, Tillman and Wittner have both faced previous theft charges.
Jones said investigators were trying to determine whether the men might be linked to another copper theft along the railroad.