Trader Joe's Assault Shows Benefit Of Investigator, Police Chief Says

Some assaults don't get a lot of police attention, especially in an area as large as Pierce County.

Take an Aug. 23 assault at the in University Place, in which a Tacoma man allegedly attacked a 69-year-old Lakewood man after the victim wouldn't give him money for gas. The suspect ran off before authorities arrived.

It wasn’t a felony attack, but authorities still consider it serious.

Before, University Place's contract police service from the Pierce County Sheriff's Department wouldn't have had enough personnel to investigate the attack properly. Chief Rusty Wilder would have had to take a patrol car off UP streets and send it to Tacoma to investigate.

The case would have gone un-investigated, at least before the University Place City Council .

Instead, he got the case and within hour tracked down suspect Christopher Harden – a 22-year-old former member of the Army – to his apartment in Tacoma. Shook couldn’t find him initially, but on his way to obtain an arrest warrant actually spotted the suspect’s vehicle.

A case that normally would have gone cold instead resulted in an arrest, Wilder says.

The University Place City Council earlier this year made hiring a police investigator a priority. Shook’s hiring - which covers a contracted investigator's salary, vehicle, training, IT needs and other costs — is running the city an estimated $130,000 this year, and $145,000 the following year.

“Without the investigator, this case would not have been assigned because it didn’t rise to a felony, and it was in an outside area where I couldn’t have sent a patrol,” he said.

The 69-year-old Lakewood man, by the way, is OK.